


All the Light Will Guide You Home

by churchyardbeast



Category: No Fandom, Original Work
Genre: Fairy Tale Elements, Fantasy, Original Character(s), Original Fiction, Religious Conflict, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Threats of Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-13
Updated: 2020-05-02
Packaged: 2020-05-03 20:25:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 39,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19190653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/churchyardbeast/pseuds/churchyardbeast
Summary: A graying man from a dismembered and scourged people comes to reexamine his doubts and apathies when he begins to encounter strange creatures seemingly right from his kindred's ancient folklore. A beautiful creature from the heavens, strange, wise, and ancient, searches for the voice that called to them.





	1. A Eosphorite, Younger Than He Feels

**Author's Note:**

> Thus begins my first posted work! This is the canon story for my OC Deus, but I don't doubt they'll have many AUs and content to come. I'm rather playing this by ear, and I'm not quite certain if I'll keep at it for very long, but I'll do my best (;^^) I appreciate feedback!

One could have said it was a long time ago, but that would not be entirely accurate.

Nor would it be to say that this story is one yet to come.

But how? Ah, you dear, poor, and weary creatures, so caught, so enraptured by the notion of time. A man once said to us that time is as a river, ever flowing. One can never touch the same water twice when it comes to a river. It is gone from one’s grasp as soon as it came. This much many among us are willing to grant him. When it comes to time, there is only one thing that truly matters; the now.

Dear and mortal thing, time is not so precious as you believe. Know now that the fox cares not for your hours and minutes and seconds, the hart seeks neither a deadline nor equation, and the whale knows no ticking clock, only the vast expanse all around it. Know now that you were once the same.

For the time being— that is, the now— do try to set such things aside, for even just a wink, as you know it. Time is something that you created, and it is awfully short, too much so for our tastes.

Time is a cage in which only men can and do reside, and this story is only a little bit about a man.

A long time ago, long after you were born, in a place very far away, and yet not so far away at all, there was a creature from the heavens, whose feet had not touched earth in a very long while.

Perhaps more pressingly, however, in this place, there also was a man named Eosphoros Ragnar.

He was not so terribly old, this Ragnar, but he did tend to think of himself as being far older than he was. Already, he had known a good deal of bloodshed, and already, he had encountered many strange things in his time. And a good thing he had, too. Ragnar got paid good money to catch, and sometimes to kill, strange things. Strange things, as he’d come to discover, are only as strange as the mind believed them to be. He felt he was good at it; catching and killing, that is. He would’ve liked to feel otherwise.

He’d been trained to hunt by an old man named Eosphoros Caswallawn— who was not Ragnar’s father, but may as well have been— beginning some twenty or so years ago, as he understood it, before the old man had been wrong about a great many things, and then died. To be fair to the old coot, he was not the only one to die, nor the only one to die in the way that he did. Ragnar had seen a great many, far too many, Eosphorites slaughtered in his time, as well as their cousins, the Hesperites and Atlans. In truth, sad as it was, he had not met another of his blood in a very long time, by this point.

It felt like an eternity ago, but oftentimes, eternity is all but a blink, in the grand scheme of things.

Caswallawn had told the young Ragnar a great many stories during their hunts, all stories Ragnar wished he’d have listened more closely to, when he had the chance. Their folklore had spoken of strange and beautiful creatures, of orphan beasts and nains and korrigans and the like, and of how their footsteps were the reason wood creaked in the night and and the reason you hear humming in your ears if you sat up too quickly. The most beloved of these strange creatures to the Eosphorites, and to the Hesperites and the Atlans, were called ebrenn, and they were the reason stars sometimes fell across the sky.

Ragnar hardly bothered to ask the old man about them, because Ragnar had been young, once, just as everyone has been. And, as everyone does when they are young, he cared little for stories that were not about adventures and handsome princes and daring princesses and evil orphan creatures.

Until one day, during the mere blink of time in which Ragnar had been a boy, they had been on their way through a forest, with tree canopies towering over their heads and tongues of fog curling against their horses’s legs. Ragnar had lifted his face to look up into the fall of the gentle rain and the whispering mist, and the old man, meanwhile, had taken a moment to look about them, scrutinizing the way the trees bent and creaked in the breeze, and his lips had curled into a crooked, gap-toothed grin.

“I mislike these woods,” Caswallawn had declared, despite the smile on his lips.

“Why?” Ragnar had asked him, more to humor his master than out of curiosity.

The old man had merely looked at him for a time. “Ebrenn have touched these trees,” he’d said finally, turning to marvel at the fog and the trees again. “The men in the tavern told me these trees bleed gold, if you manage to break a branch. Poor idiots think they’ve a miracle outside their town, but they’re wrong, lad. That’s how you know if an ebrenn have come down from the heavens to walk the woods. But it is better that you do not know. A thousand times an ebrenn has lead a man to paradise, and a thousand times have they lead a man to death. Wise and beautiful as they are, as worthy as respect and reverence as they are, men like us should be wise enough to know not to take the hand of an ebrenn, should the chance ever come, because men like us should be wise enough to never take such a chance.”

And Ragnar had nodded, thinking this was perhaps merely another lesson in the way of being a Eosphoros, like the books Caswallawn had taught him to read and the coin he had taught him to count.

But the old man had continued. “If the trees bleed gold, and the animals are tricksy, and the mist hangs low and never rises, beware the ebrenn, for they are beautiful, and they will take you by the hand and guide you to a fate they have decided for you, whatever it may be,” he’d declared. “Never do wrong in a wood such as this one, Ragnar, for ebrenn live forever, but rarely do they choose to forget.”

“I won’t, Eosphoros,” Ragnar had promised, wishing he hadn’t humored the old man.

He did not care for stories about beautiful fairies and misty woods. He simply longed for a dry bed in a warm inn, or, at the very least, for it to stop raining. How simple things had been, then.

But, as mentioned before, Caswallawn, even honorable and gentle a chieftain as he had been, had been wrong about a great many things, and then died. Ragnar was almost glad for it, honestly. He was not so terribly certain he believed in all of that, anymore, not after all that he had seen.

Ragnar felt old, or, at least, older than a great many Eosphorites could hope to live to, nowadays.

He’d long since lost any belief in his master’s stories, but even still, he held them close to himself. He valued them greatly— his people no longer had much else to their name besides their folklore. He had considered writing the stories down someplace, once or twice before, but he had since deemed it not worth the risk. Even if it were, he did not feel somebody like him was truly the one for the job.

So, Ragnar simply did his best to earn his living, hoping there was another Eosphorite somewhere in the world who still recalled the stories, and who was more deserving to tell them than he.

It was nearly painful, being one of the last, but the pain had long since dulled to a mere ache. 

Despite everything, there he, Eosphoros Ragnar, remained, his youth come and gone, walking the woods they’d walked so long ago, and the forest was much the same. Ragnar would have liked to believe in the strange, heavenly creatures who would sometimes descend from the stars to offer his people guidance, whether good or bad. He understood now, however, that it was more likely that the trees bled gold because the syrup in the wood would become amber in luster when it crystallized, and all that animals were tricksy by nature, it was the churning river and the rain that kicked up the pale, low hanging mist.

And yet, it was his home nonetheless, and for all that was taken, that much he was happy to have.

He just wished it didn’t rain so damned often, hereabouts.

***

The fox traps closest to the headwaters were empty. All of them triggered and bloody, but empty.

It was the horse’s idea to follow the river upstream, but she did not follow Ragnar. She would wait for his return, but she would not accompany him, that much was clear after a few fruitless tugs at her lead. He didn’t much blame the beast. Calm and loyal a mare as she was, the path he had chosen since meeting her was an unfortunate one, even he could admit, but he felt it to be one of necessity.

He followed the river, and it did not take long before he finally found the faint, reddened tracks of a fox against the sodden stone. He needed but nine foxes, and he had left only eight with his mare. He’d lost the others in the traps, but he at least could recover the last one he needed, and find some evidence of what exactly had sabotaged his efforts, whether they be man or particularly clever animal.

And so, Ragnar continued on his path, drawing his cloak and fur lined coat closer about himself.

The tracks never parted from the riverside. Ragnar followed the trail for what was perhaps hours, until finally the river widened, and the churning white water became eerily still and black.

Ragnar paused for a moment, there, only to look about himself. In the handful of decades which had been his lifetime, he had not been to his part of the forest before. He’d never had any reason to follow the river upstream, and so he never had. It was quieter than the rest of the woods, here. He could hear the distant rush of the river downstream, but other than that, nothing. No chirping of birds, nor the sounds of animals in the thicket, not even the rustle of leaves. Despite the rain, there was not a breeze to rustle them.

He stepped down into the water with one boot, if only to break the surface of the water and bring some semblance of movement to this place. The blackness rippled. It did little to ease the silence.

He heard the snap of a twig, so quiet he could barely hear it. He stilled himself, his eyes reflexively searching the undergrowth for any sign of the vixen he’d lost track of. He found nothing, not a movement of the fog, not a twitch of the leaves of a bush. Ragnar swallowed, uneasy, despite himself.

The light in this place moved strangely, as though it were gathering faintly behind the trees, rather than spilling through their leaves. A trick of the fog, most likely, but no less odd and disorienting.

Ragnar reached up to pull sodden dark hair away from his face, cautious not to let it catch on any of the old, worn piercings in his face. This was a curious place, indeed, but truthfully, the forest as a whole was a curious place. There is not a forest in the world that is not a strange and curious place.

He did not have too terribly long to dwell on the eeriness of it all, however.

Sudden as the burst of a cannon, a fox— his fox, most likely— burst from the thicket and the fog, perhaps hoping to make a beeline past Ragnar to its den. Even wounded, it was a quick little thing, and he had to dive to catch it. He managed to grab the little beast by its tail, at the cost of crashing into the water beneath him. What did it matter? He was already soaking from the rain, and he had his ninth fox.

Ragnar dragged himself up onto his elbows, spitting murky water, and he grabbed the fox by the scruff of its neck. The vixen protested, and loudly so, twisting and snaring in his grasp, but Ragnar was a big and powerful man, even soaking wet, and his grip was far too strong for it to break from.

He lifted the fox up from the water to see if it was one of the ones that had escaped his trap, and sure enough, the fur of its hind leg was matted and stained red. It didn’t look terribly torn up, so it could not have slipped free. There was no doubt about it, somebody had pried open the trap and set it free. He sighed and dragged himself into a sitting position in the river water, dark hair clutching to his face, soaked down to the bone, still holding the vixen up out of the blackness by the scruff of its neck.

“Someone’s looking out for you, huh?” he inquired, perhaps not so angry as he should have been.

Something drifted against the skin of his wrist, then, where he’d braced his weight in the riverbed, and it tangled about his arm. For an moment, Ragnar startled at the feeling, but whatever the thing was, it felt like neither plant nor animal. He paused and he lifted his hand from underneath the water.

There, tangled about his arm, was a fine golden cord, decorated with tiny pearls and seashells and soaked feathers. Besides the wet feathers, the piece had suffered little to no wear, odd as it was.

It must have been dropped in fairly recently. Even the river silt had not settled on the chain.

The rain continued to fall, straight downwards, with no wind to carry it in any direction. The fox twisted in Ragnar’s grip, growing more and more unhappy by each passing second, and so, he sighed and he tucked the jewelry away into the pocket of his trousers. He dragged himself onto his feet and rose from the black water, then, still holding the vixen by its scruff, the very both of them soaked to the bone.

He lingered there one last moment to look into the trees, searching for any sign of somebody who may have lost a necklace (that was the only thing Ragnar could see the strange piece as realistically being). Perhaps by the same somebody who had sprung his traps. He would not be surprised.

He heard the sound of footsteps, then, swiftly there and then gone at his back.

It had only barely been audible underneath the distant roaring of the river downstream. Ragnar turned to look towards the sound, but was only met with the same strange movement of the light all about himself. It was as if it flinched away from him. He looked around, brows furrowed slightly. Even the vixen had gone quiet in his hand, its little brown eyes fixated upon his face from where it dangled.

“Is there anybody out there?” he called, his eyes once again upon the tree line curling above either side of the still, murky river. He drew from his pocket the cord of pearls and shells, and he held it over his head for to woods to witness. “I’ve found a piece of jewelry,” he added. “Does it belong to you?”

A moment passed, and the river remained just as still as it had been before.

“I won’t hurt you,” Ragnar called again, doing his best to ignore the fox’s staring. He wasn’t even entirely sure who he was calling to, if anyone at all. “I will return what is yours, if you claim it.”

The silence persisted. It had become far too suffocating for Ragnar’s tastes.

He tucked the jewelry away in his pocket again. “Suit yourself,” he resigned. “I doubt this will be the last time I find myself here, anyways,” he mumbled, half musing aloud to himself. Then; “If you ever decide you want to take it back from me, then you’ll need only wait for me to return.”

Silence. The forest offered him no reply, not even the rustle of leaves.

***

The walk returning to the mare felt far less long than the walk away from her.

It was not so difficult to find her, again. She was as white as his hair was dark. Her greeting at his return was quiet as ever, the simple offering of the stare of her golden brown eyes as he neared.

Upon returning to her side, Ragnar pulled a spool of bandages from the mare’s saddlebag and he bandaged the squirming fox’s leg. Once that had been done and over with, he, gently as he possibly could, considering the circumstances, put the fox in the cage with the other eight. He then lifted the whole of the cage up and tied it off to the other side of his mare’s tack. It was a small cage, he knew, far too small for so many foxes. He was sorry for it, but they would not have to put up with it for too much longer.

Ragnar slipped a foot into the stirrup of his saddle and swung up onto his horse. “Sit tight. Won’t be a long ride,” he promised the foxes, shedding his soaked cloak as he spoke and draping it over the cage, in part to shelter them from the falling rain and in part so he did not have to look at them.

And then, without another word, he gave the horse a gentle nudge with his boots, and he set off on his way out of the forest, now following the river downstream. They rode at a pace that was not quick, but was not slow. Rarely had he ever needed to tell the great white beast where to go. It seemed as though she often knew exactly where it was he needed to go, and where she needed to take him.

As they rode, Ragnar one again drew the golden cord from the pocket of his trousers and he held it in the palm of his hand. Even now in his pam, it seemed utterly immaculate, as if no part of its journey, however long it may have been, had been enough to sully it’s golden cord and pale decor.

The jewelry felt warm in the palm of his hand, reflecting what little light broke through the dark clouds overhead and turning it pale gold against his skin. Pearls and shells. He’d seen pearls before, on the necks of the rich and foolish, and he’d found shells in the silt of the churning river, before, but he’d never seen the sea. The paths he had chosen had never lead him in such a direction. Ragnar had always had the river, at least, and he had always felt that was enough for him, when it came down to it.

The forest leaves rustled overhead, and he was glad to hear something other than silence.

He understood now that it was more likely that the trees bled gold because the syrup in the wood would become amber in luster when it crystallized, and all that animals were tricksy by nature, it was the churning river and the ever persistent rain that kicked up such a thick fog about their feet. He understood now that there were a great many things in the world that were seemingly strange, but were mere illusions.

And yet, Ragnar understood just as well that some things were not, could never be, mere tricks of the mind or the hand. Sometimes things were quite simply strange, to their very core. He had always done his best to be respectful of such things, as he had been taught to be from childhood, and the white mare upon whose back he rode was not an exception.

“Say…” Ragnar began, but his mare tossed her head before he could continue.

“Whatever you are going to ask,” she interrupted, “it is surely a conversation we have had before.”

Ragnar supposed he couldn’t deny that, but it wasn’t as if any of their previous conversations had amounted to very much, in the past. “I’ve got plenty new questions. Maybe even the same old questions. It won’t matter much, either way. You haven’t exactly answered many of them,” he pointed out.

The white mare did not have a retort for that. He took it as begrudging permission to continue.

“You found me already with a saddle and reins, and yet no rider. The first time you spoke to me, I thought you’d leap into the nearest pond to drown and eat me,” Ragnar began, one hand entangled in the aforementioned reins, the other the golden jewelry. “Are you certain you’re really just a horse?”

The white mare tossed her head again, as if offended by the notion. “Yes. I am a horse,” she said.

“But you speak,” he pointed out, looking up from the jewelry in his hand. “Horses don’t speak.”

“Everything speaks, in its own way,” the mare contended, “if you’ve the patience to listen for it.”

It took Ragnar a moment to come up with a response to that. “But you speak in my way,” he said finally, more out of a simple desire to manage to get an answer that was not some sort of riddle out of the mare rather than actual curiosity. “Most animals don’t speak in the way that you do, you know.”

The mare was far more quick on her feet than he was. “It is the only way you will listen,” she said.

Ragnar could not help but huff a little at her jape, though he was not so sour natured to not smile. Rare and circular as these conversations were, it was better than having just the forest and the rain and the foxes to speak with. “Okay, okay, no need for all that,” he chuckled, ghost of a smile on his lip, knowing he would get nowhere with her. “I was just curious why you’ve stuck around as long as you have.”

“I come to you, when you need me,” replied the mare, “and I take you to where you need to go.”

Ragnar quirked a brow. “Couldn’t any horse do that?” he inquired. “Even one that doesn’t talk?”

The mare considered that. “I suppose. But oftentimes, men do not know where it is they must go.”

It didn’t exactly answer his question, but Ragnar knew it was more likely than not the closest thing to one he would ever get. And so; “I found this upstream,” he announced, leaning forward and letting the piece of strange jewelry hang down from his palm so that he could hold it out in front of the white mare’s head. He saw one of her ears twitch a little at the sight of it. “Do you know what this is?”

The horse said nothing for a time, simply looked at it. “I do,” she responded, “but I don’t recall.”

It was about what he’d expected. “You don’t seem to recall very much at all,” Ragnar responded, not unkindly, as he settled back into his saddle and tucked the piece into its newfound place in his pocket.

“You expect so much from a horse, my friend,” said the mare, nearly amused.

Ragnar supposed that was fair enough.


	2. Mama Farfalee and the Witches Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I usually write upwards of 30,000 words per chapter in my projects and I'm really trying to cut down when it comes to this one and keep it concise, so I apologize if the pacing is a little awkward! This is a first draft, and I'll get the hang of it with practice!

Rain did not seem to fall terribly often, wherever there was black flags flying overhead.

The downpour began to lighten up and then stop altogether as Ragnar and his horse approached the town. He was glad for it, happy that he may finally be able to enjoy an afternoon free of being soaked to the bone, but he was glad for only an instant. It did not take him very long to notice all the black, awful flags flying from every post they could, like omens of death. They hadn’t been there, days ago.

He reigned his horse to a brief halt at the sight, dread gnawing at his heart in his chest.

It had been a great many years since Ragnar had seen the flags of the Holy See flying. He did not very much care to find out why they had finally returned, nor why they had left in the first place.

The mare did not seem keen to stop at his command. It took a moment for her to finally slow to a reluctant halt, and she turned her head as if regarding him over her shoulder. She watched him for a time, waiting for him to urge her on, and when he did not, she began walking again, without command.

He did not protest. As much as he would’ve preferred to avoid it altogether, Ragnar knew she had the right of it. They would have to pass through the town to get to where they needed to go.

There was nothing to be done about it.

Ragnar rode onwards, spurring his mare into a trot. The sooner they were gone, the better.

He could go without a hot meal from the tavern for a day, and his mare could go without feed for a day. It was not worth the risk. He pulled the hood of his coat over his head as they went, his thundering heart heavy in his chest, and he checked to make sure the foxes were well hidden by his cloak.

“Oh, Ragnar,” greeted the tavern maid from the door as he passed, an armful of firewood in her arms. Her name was Beatrice, and she was a young girl of barely fourteen, red of cheek and hair. Ragnar paused for her, though he wanted only to be gone from this place as soon as he could be. “In Gaia’s name, you look like you’ve seen a ghost, old man!” Beatrice japed, grinning at him. “And you’re right soaked, you are! Have you caught cold? Come in for some stew and warm up by the fire, why don’t you?”

On the steps, however, sitting with big tankards in their hands, was a group of men in black, worn armor, not so drunk as the ones singing loudly inside, but still drunk. At least, too drunk to pay Ragnar too much heed. The emblem on the breast of their suits was unmistakable, and horribly familiar.

“Not tonight, Beatrice,” Ragnar muttered, reining his mare onwards before the girl could protest.

He wanted no trouble. He did not want to even be noticed, not by the knights of the Holy See.

It was not as cheerful a town as it had been when Ragnar was a child. There was no green grass left beneath the mare’s feet, only dirt and horse manure and little stones hardened into a vague road, and the air stunk of alcohol. There were few trees, even fewer flowers, and not one carefree cat wandering the streets. The little colored flags strung across the dirt road between the houses and the taverns had quickly become muted and sullied in the shadow of the massive black ones flying overhead.

Perhaps the only thing lighthearted about the town was the children, hurrying around the streets and laughing as they chased and tagged each other, but even this stopped when a weary old man shouted for them to be quiet. The children continued to play, but far more quietly now than before.

A great many doors had been marked on the frames with white paint, a silent oath that the home was open for the knights of the Holy See. Black flags hung from even the windows of homes. 

Ragnar found it rather sickening. Yet, he knew he should not have been as surprised as he was.

He did not speak to anybody, not even to command his horse. He kept his head down as he rode, hoping dearly to leave unbothered. His mare walked briskly, perhaps to ease Ragnar’s discomfort, but not so quickly that it would attract any unwanted, perhaps even dangerous, attention, and not so quickly that he could not hear brief slivers of the conversations of those he passed walking the streets.

“A good six more people were bitten, last night, I hear. Children, too, in their very cribs! Can you imagine?” murmured one woman to another as she passed. “Each time, it happens at night.”

The other woman sighed and shook her head as they walked. “Surely, the arrival of the Holy See has driven them from where they have infected the ground beneath us. Our Lord’s holy knights's presence will drive evil from His earth,” she said, placing a gentle hand over her heart. The other girl followed suit. “We can only pray that nobody will become ill. Taking care of a rat bite is a filthy affair.”

“I’ll bet you they came from that midnight carnival the old hag runs in the forest,” added the first woman, her voice nearly a hiss. “Only somebody guilty of witchcraft can keep so many creatures from the skies like that. She must have made a deal with the Enemy himself, to have managed it.”

“I told everybody that place is a goblin market, didn’t I? Just like in the poems, I said,” the second nodded in agreement. “The Holy See will find that hag and snuff her out, sooner or later.”

A great shadow fell over him, then, and Ragnar looked up to see a massive banner, as pitch as the night sky, had swallowed him in its wake. He spurred his horse into a canter, despite himself. He could not bear this town any longer, and the white mare knew the way to Farfalee’s Midnight Carnival.

The only thing that brought him any semblance of comfort was the fact that he still kept the odd string of jewelry in his coat pocket. Ragnar nearly reached for it, seeking the strange sense of warmth and safety it provided, but he very quickly thought better of it. He did not know why, but some part of himself understood that it simply must remain in his pocket, out of sight and mind of any other, safe.

He would keep it safe. He would keep it safe, for someone, even if he did not know who that was.

 ***

The white mare waited in the trees, just outside of the carnival, as she always did.

The dark clouds overhead had broken somewhat, and above them, the sky had turned pink with the turn of the evening. The sun, orange in its luster, bent from the sky to kiss the horizon, and the forest was cast in orange and golden light. The wind at his back urged Ragnar onwards, out of the forest, away from his horse, and into the clearing, with purpose and a destination he dared not question.

Mama Farfalee’s Midnight Carnival was very, very quiet, when the moon was not high.

Ragnar had long since grown used to it. He wandered the empty carnival for a time, as he always did, his cage of unhappy foxes in hand as he waited for somebody to come and find him.

In the fading light, he could see the silhouettes of the “attractions” of Farfalee’s carnival hidden from view, their shadows cast upon the burlap their cages had been covered with. He did not dare venture a peek. Once, he’d gone to pull back the burlap to see behind it, out of curiosity, and now he bore a nasty scar on his hand as punishment for it. Ragnar was not a terribly curious man, anymore.

He heard the crowing of ravens overhead, then crowing of an old woman, not so long afterward.

“Well, well, bless my old husk of a heart,” the old hag croaked as she came hobbling over to him, something between a sneer and a grin on her lip. Ragnar was a big man, bigger than most other men he’d met, and hunched over as she was, she barely reached his ribs. Her hair, white as his horse’s coat, was long and straight as an arrow, and she held in her hand a gnarled walking stick, decorated with glittering stones and bleached bones and fraying rope. All the decoration had no meaning, no magical purpose. They were simply there to seem as if they did, another trick up the illusionist’s sleeve. “I thought I had seen the last of you, my boy, after I saw those black flags,” she continued, still baring her crooked teeth.

So, she knew, already. Ragnar again supposed he should have been less surprised than he was. 

He set the cage of foxes down in the grass. “I’m not one to leave a job half done,” he mumbled as he rose and crossed his arms over his chest. “You won’t see much of me, after this, not until the Creed has moved on to do whatever it is the Creed of Gaia does. You’d do well to disappear, yourself.”

“The Holy See can gnash its teeth all it wants, it won’t be the thing that kills Mama Farfalee. The midnight carnival will stay right here, as it has for ten happy years.” She leaned down to look into the cage of foxes. “Hm… Yes, yes, these will do. I’ll put wings on their backs and call them nain.”

Ragnar did not bother to tell her that nain don’t have wings. It would not be the first time she had made use of the villagers’s ignorance of his people’s mythology for her own profit.

“Now is not the time for performances, you old hag,” he said, even as she counted her coin out in one wrinkled hand and handed him his payment. “I am a Eosphorite, but I can take my piercings out and wash the paint from my face. All of this will be hard to hide,” he pointed out, gesturing at the carnival around them with one big, calloused hand. “The town already whispers about you. It won’t be long before the Holy See hears them, and I’ll be far gone from here by the time they begin to whisper about me, too.”

She wagged a finger, lips spreading into crooked grin. “But they have not come here in search for me, my boy, no, no, no,” sneered Mama Farfalee, a twinkle in her eye that was nearly arrogant. “They are here for the temple your cousins built, many, many years ago. Before even Mama was born.”

Ragnar paused at that. Could it be? No, that was impossible.

“Don’t be foolish, you old bat, and do not mock me,” he snapped, shaking his head. “The Atlan’s stone circles have all been taken by the Creed. They are lost to my people, all of them.”

Mama Farfalee laughed at that, a long, hearty cackle, louder than the call of an elk, much to his frustration. “You would say that, boy, I knew you would. You should put more trust in your elders’s words, you know,” she sneered, jabbing a pointed, dirty fingernail into his stomach. “One is lost, yes, lost to all of you. The stone circle is lost, and the Holy See has come here to find it. I can feel it, here, and so can they!”

Ragnar stepped backwards, his dark brows furrowed in suspicion. “‘They’?” he echoed.

Mama Farfalee paused at that, looked around, and then she waved for him to come closer, again. Ragnar did, albeit reluctantly, if only to humor her. “The rats,” she whispered. “For three days, they have been here. They have not found the circle, yet, but they are looking hard. I hear their whispers.”

“The townsfolk believe the rats are yours,” Ragnar responded, less quietly than she.

“Pah!” Mama Farfalee spat, planting a hand on her hips. “Mine!” she scoffed, incredulous. “I hate rats, boy. They’re witch’s pets, I tell you, and miserable little dirty balls of secrets, the lot of them. I’ve seen them, you know. The Witches, the ones you once spoke of.” She leaned forwards, her knuckles white and shaking where she held to her staff. “They came a day after the Holy See arrived. They must have hidden in its very shadow! I hear them on the wind. They whisper a name I’ve never heard. Well, they won’t have this forest, no, no. This is Mama Farfalee’s forest, and this is Farfalee’s Midnight Carnival!”

The ramblings of a mad old woman. Ragnar scowled at her and set to readying himself to leave.

“I’m long finished with this performance of yours, old hag,” he grumbled, pocketing his payment without even bothering to count it and stuffing it into the pocket that did not hold the jewelry. “You’ve no right to speak of the razh benyn that way, not when you’ve falsified so many of our other stories.”

At this, Mama Farfalee sneered again. “Not everything can be a trick of the eye. You know this.”

As if on cue, there came a rumble from within the nearest cage as he passed, behind the burlap. It was a terrible sound, like the scraping of nails against a chalkboard and creaking of ropes and the cry of a catamount all at once, like a mockery of a man’s dying wails for help. Ragnar instantly jolted backwards at the sound, his hand instinctively fumbling to take hold of the hilt of the broadsword at his hip. He’d never heard anything like it, and Ragnar had heard a great many strange and awful things.

“What is in that cage, old woman?” he asked, breathless, and he almost immediately regretted it.

Mama Farfalee simply chuckled, and she calmly hobbled over to the side of the cage and reached up with her withered hand to pull the pull the burlap down. Ragnar was met with blind, milky eyes, blind eyes belonging to the subject of hundreds of his childhood nightmares. Immediately upon being bared to the evening light, the beast within shook its massive form, black feathers puffed outwards, and it bared its horrible, dagger-like teeth at them both, once again letting out a sound nearly akin to a keen.

“What do you think it is?” she asked, still grinning. “What do you see in Mama Farfalee’s cage?”

Ragnar shook his head. He would not say its name. To speak its name would be to give it power.

“You’re mad, madder than I ever could’ve thought,” he breathed, backing away from the cage as he spoke. “You will never see me again, you arrogant old hag.” He turned to storm off, to go back into the woods, to go far from her, far from the Creed, but most of all, far from the Orphan Beast. “Or at least not as long as you continue to fool yourself into thinking you can hold that thing captive!”

Farfalee cackled at his retreat, cackled as if it were the funniest thing in the world.

“Where do you think you’re going, boy?” she called, leaning against the cage to wave her staff in the air above her head. “I bring creatures from the skies down to the earth, you knew this. You knew this.”

Ragnar did not dignify her with a response. He had his coin, no reason to stay, and plenty reason to take himself and his horse as far away from there as he could muster. Even walking away, even blind as it was, Ragnar could feel the Orphan Beast’s white eyes burning holes into the very center of his back. He could feel its malice, could nearly hear its innermost thoughts, deliberating what it would do to her, what it would do to him. Each step felt heavier than the last, under its milky white stare, but he carried on his way. 

“So scared of black flags and Orphan Beasts and old hags, so scared. You’d be frightful of a black cat in your path, wouldn’t you? Your fears are misplaced, stupid boy!” Mama Farfalee shouted after him, a smile still on her lip. “The Witches Three will know you when they see you. You were safer here!”

The ramblings of a mad old woman. She’d grown too interwoven with the character she played.

 ***

He made it back through town and into the forest again before night fell, and he made his camp and set a fire amidst the trees before the moon could reach its precipice in the night sky.

Ragnar sat before his campfire, watching tongues of fire twist and tremble, snapping at each other like the heads of a dragon. His horse lingered nearby. He had not bothered to tie her reins off to anything. She wouldn’t wander off, and even if she did, she would return when he needed her.

He leaned back against the trunk of a tree behind him, then, his weary brown eyes fluttering shut. It had been a long day, and this would be the last night he slept under these trees in a while.

A sigh escaping his mouth, Ragnar reached up with a big, calloused hand to touch his face, to feel the faded, familiar metal curled about his upper lip and against the bridge of his nose and the curve of his brows. He’d taken them out just once, when he was younger and less sentimental, and only to save his own hide. He thought to take them out again, but he found he could not bear to, not again, not yet.

And so, he settled for scrubbing at the paint beneath his eyes and on his bottom lip with his hands, until he was left with only black, indistinct smears across his cheeks and down his chin.

It would do. The paint was still noticeable, but no longer noticeable as being of Eosphorite origin. 

He forced his eyes to open again, no matter how heavy they were, and he reached into the pocket of his coat for the long golden chain, decorated with pearls and shells and feathers. He held it in the palm of his hand and simply looked at it for awhile. The sight of it made his eyes ache a little less.

He closed his fist and he lifted the cord to his lips. He simply held it there for a time, inhaling and exhaling deeply, as he stared into the fire, accepting whatever comfort it had to offer him in that moment. Then, after the moment had passed, he took one final, deep inhale, and uncurled his fist. He returned the jewelry to his coat pocket, where it would be safe and hidden from sight once again.

 ***

He did not recall having fallen asleep, but he must have, because when he jolted awake, — quite suddenly, as if he had fallen in his dreams— the moon had completed much of its journey across the night sky overhead. The morning had not quite broken, yet, but doubtless it would very soon, here.

His white mare stood at his side, her head low, her nostrils mere inches from his ear.

Ragnar reached to rub the sleep from his eye and the crick from his neck, groaning a bit under his breath as he did. “Did you wake me up…?” he grumbled, his voice a ragged, groggy slur.

The horse said nothing, simply pushed at his head with her nose and snorted in his face.

“Alright, alright,” he muttered, sitting up and rolling his old shoulders out. “I’m up, now, I swear.”

The forest was quiet. He could hear the soft chirping of crickets and the songs of the earliest birds and the whisper of the wind, but none did very much to ease the eeriness of a night in the woods.

At least his fire was still alight. He would have expected it to be naught but smoldering ashes, by then, and yet it still burned bright, smoking and churning in the night wind. The shadows it cast were long and dark. The smoke had intermixed with the fog, hanging low and reeking of embers.

The whisper of the wind did not sound too terribly much like wind, anymore.

And then, there was a hand reaching through the roaring flames of his campfire, fingers long and spindly and nails sharp as claws. Then there was another, and then a third, reaching through the light and clutching to the burning, charred wood as if the fire did not lick at its black, leathery skin.

Ragnar rose from a sitting position up into a crouch, suddenly very awake.

He reached to his waist and drew from its sheath the old, battle-worn sword, stained and chipped, he’d carried for years now, the same one Caswallawn had once worn at his hip, years ago.

A woman crawled towards him through the fire, her furrowed skin clutching to her bones, covered in soot and dirt. She had ragged, torn fabric about her sallow throat and over the front of her ribcage, and there was oily, coarse fur draped over her shoulders. Yellow, not quite clean bones curled up from her back and clattered where they hung down on cords from her arms and her waist. She wore a skull over her face, like the skull of a mouse or a squirrel, perhaps, but bigger, big enough to keep as a mask.

She whispered to him as she neared, and hers was not the only voice he heard.

“Silence hurts more than truth,” she murmured, slipping from his campfire like a slug from a leaf.

Razh benyn. Ragnar scowled and looked about for any sign of this being one of Mama Farfalee’s illusions. He had already been met with one monster from his childhood nightmares that night, surely the heavens would not have cursed him with the sight of another, mere hours after the first?

No. There was no sign of sleight of hand, nor trick of the eye. He was looking a Witch in the face.

“The man finds bloom of youth. Sisters three find bleeding tooth,” the witches whispered, though Ragnar could not see her sisters, yet. He brandished his broadsword in a fruitless warning as the first crept toward him. “Open our lips and speak it true. Speak what's honest, we must do.”

She reached for him, reached for the pocket of his coat, and he dared to kick her away.

The witch hissed at him as she recoiled, still on all fours, baring her teeth behind her mask. At his side, the white mare tossed her head and pawed at the ground with her hooves. Ragnar could see shadows in the fog out of the corners of his eyes, the shadows of her sisters creeping forth, surely.

“From his home, the man must soon depart. Pearl and feather in pocket, close to his heart. Yet for this old home he will not yearn very long. A good one he’ll find, soon, in the birdsong.”

The words themselves were not so harsh, but the sisters spat them at him as if they were a curse.

Ragnar vaulted forward with sword poised to stab, and once again, the first of the sisters recoiled backward from him, snarling and teeth dripping spit like a rabid cat. It did little to dissuade her. There are few things that can frighten a witch, and a mere man with a sword is far from one of them.

“With sisters’s eyes we wish to see, the man’s destiny. The aotrou must know he’s debts to pay. And his scorned shall collect, someday. Until he has done right by thee, he will be cursed by the guilty.”

She reached her hand out for him, again. This time, her sisters reached with her.

The white mare whickered and rounded on Ragnar, then, rather suddenly, and she stood between him and the witches. She stamped her hoof on the ground and tossed her head. Before he even fully could understand what he was doing, Ragnar was upon her back, slipping his feet into the stirrups of her saddle. He could feel the hand of one of the witches, claws clutching at the fabric of his trousers.

“Fill my head till light of day tomorrow.”

The white mare reared and bucked, and somehow, Ragnar was able to hold on, to cling tightly to her back. An instant later, she was running, running the fastest he had ever seen the mare run.

“Drown in your own sorrow.”

 ***

She did not slow her gallop until the dawn had broken, bathing the dewy forest in pale blue light.

It took Ragnar until he saw the sun rising above the horizon to finally sheath his sword. He could barely hear the sound of it, over the roar of his own blood in his ears. “The razh benyn. They wanted me to go with them. Didn’t they?” he said, breathless, his hands trembling at the reins.

“They did,” the mare confirmed. She had her breath, and her voice did not shake.

“They knew I couldn’t go with them,” Ragnar added. “They tried to get me to come, anyways.”

The white mare tossed her head. There was sweat in her mane. “They can speak only truth,” she replied. “That does not make them honest. They did not want you to go where you must.”

He swallowed hard, his heartbeat finally beginning to settle. He turned to glance behind himself, running a hand back through his hair, dark and long and haphazard from sweat. “What they said… Will I ever come back to this place?” Ragnar asked, turning back to look down at the mare.

She said nothing for a good while, simply met and held his gaze, steadily, but not very reassuringly, from where she stood on the other side of the campfire. “I do not know,” she said finally.

“What if I need to return, someday?” he asked. He did not know why his throat ached so badly.

“If that day comes,” replied the mare, matter of factly, “I will take you to where you need to go.”

A moment passed, perhaps longer than it actually was. Ragnar felt his breath return to his lungs, slowly but surely, as the sun began to slowly rise in the distance. He could hear the roar of the river, not so terribly far away. “Where are we going, now?” he asked, though he already knew the answer.

The mare glanced over her shoulder at him, paler than ever in the morning light. “I will take you to the river,” she said, nearly solemnly, “and you will go where you know you must.”

She had the right of it. He knew she did. But, when did she not have the right of it?


	3. With Hands Reaching For The Heavens

When Ragnar returned to the place upstream, returned to the still, black water and the silent trees, it was more out of a strange, powerful feeling of resignation than anything else.

He had been there not even a full day earlier, and yet it felt like eternity ago. The white mare would wait for him, as she had before. It had begun to rain again, gentle and without any breeze, and it did little to disrupt the surface of the pitch dark water. It was cold, but not unbearably so.

For a time, he simply sat on the side of the river, waiting for something to happen.

Nothing happened. The silence persisted. The forest offered him nothing but the soft sound of rain.

Finally, Ragnar pulled himself up onto his feet, having decided he was no longer keen on just sitting and waiting for fate to find its way to him. He stripped himself of his ashen brown coat, lined with old fur. He took a brief moment to make certain the gold thread of pearl and seashell and feather remained safely tucked inside his pocket, then set to freeing himself of his leather armor. First his vest, then his tassets, his greaves, his boots, and finally, his vambraces, placing them all in a pile next to his coat. He considered for a moment removing the old bandages beneath his vambraces, but he decided against it.

Left in only his shirt and his trousers, both garments faded black and fitted snug against his muscle, but worn and becoming threadbare, Ragnar finally began to feel the chill of the rain. His thick, dark hair was wet, haphazard, and heavy on his shoulders, and his sodden clothes clutched to his skin.

The water, black as the sky on a moonless night, became very deep, very quickly.

It was brisk, but not unbearably cold, especially after he let his head sink under the water, the river bank long since having plunged rapidly downwards. He had never been a particularly graceful swimmer, but he was better than most of his peers had been, growing up. He was at least good enough to hold his breath and to let his eyes flicker open under the water. Despite all the blackness on the surface, it was not so terribly difficult to see, once underneath, weightless in the river’s barely moving current.

The water was murky, just enough to make it seem as though the river continued on for forever in every direction, and the pale daylight cast wavering, muted gold and green hues all around him. He could see the shadows of lily pads and the silhouettes of fish big and small alike overhead.

When he looked down, he could see the fingers of a massive stone hand.

The stone was cracked and faded and coated in river silt, and deep green river foliage curled about the wrist of the great statue, shifting slightly now and again. Each worn finger was nearly twice his height in length, the palm large enough across that even Ragnar, as large and broad a man as he was, could have stood with both feet steady upon it, were it not so deep under the surface of the water.

It was unmistakable. An Atlan stone circle, outstretched to reach for the heavens.

Ragnar simply marveled at it for a time, weightless in the murky depths. The Atlan stone circles, massive hands of stone and marble to reach for the heavens with, had always been the most impressive of his people’s places of worship, and he was sure the Creed had known this. He had not seen a stone circle that had not been stolen and desecrated by the Creed in too many years. And yet, here one remained, lost to his cousins and the Creed of Gaia alike, just as Mama Farfalee had said it did.

And the Holy See had come here to discover it, to take the last of the circles for their own.

Or was it the last? Could there be other such circles, hidden away and forgotten? He did not know. After the past day or so, Ragnar suddenly felt he knew far less than he ever had before.

***

When he finally returned to the shoreline of the river, he did so slowly, practically dragging himself up onto the mossy rocks of the riverbank. He was not so old as he felt, but he was nevertheless not so lithe as he had once been, and the rain did little to dissuade the cold clinging to his very bones.

He rested his elbows on his knees and he simply sat there, next to his coat and his armor for a time, his back to the trees, wordlessly staring out at the glassy, pitch dark surface of the water.

It did not take too terribly long to hear those quiet footsteps again, there at his back, but not leaving.

Ragnar let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. “I thought I might be waiting for you,” he confessed, turning to face them. “I know you,” he said. “If I were blind, I’d know what you are.”

They were beautiful, unquestionably so. Their hair, loose and wavy, looked as if it had been spun from gold. It spilled freely down their bare shoulders and framed their fair face. Their skin seemed almost to glow in the pale daylight, the freckles on their cheeks sparkled like stars in the sky.

Bare before him, they were feminine, small and slight in their stature, though supple of curves and of breast. They did not, however, lack presence. Far from it; their very presence felt nearly vivid, but it was not suffocating in its power. Indeed, the look in their pale blue eye did not feel so different from the feeling of relief that overcomes oneself when they return home after a long and difficult day.

“Here, take it,” said Ragnar, once he’d swallowed the air that had caught in his throat. He held out the gold thread, decorated with pearl and seashell and feather, for them. “It’s yours, isn’t it?”

Without a word, they reached out and gently took the piece from his hand. They wrapped the cord nine times about their arm, until it fit snugly against the fair, nearly glowing, pale skin of their wrist. Once finished, they lifted their face and cocked their head to one side, as if intrigued.

“I saw you once before. Who are you?” they asked, not unkindly, hair falling delicate into their face.

Ragnar rose to his feet, slowly, hoping desperately that he would not somehow manage to startle the creature before him away. They did not seem to fear him. “I am Ragnar, blood of the Dawn Bringer,” he replied, though he found himself feeling as if the words were catching in his throat. “I will not hurt you.”

They held his gaze with easy temperance. “Nor I you.”

It was somewhat of a relief, to hear such words, Ragnar had to admit. “Are you the Maiden?” he inquired. And then, when the creature simply stared at him; “One of the twenty five ebrenn,” he added, breathless. “A muse. My mother, she kept a pearl statue in the Maiden’s image.”

The creature simply looked at him for a time, then offered him a shrug of their naked shoulders.

“Maybe,” they said. “I confess, I have not heard of these things, before.”

Ragnar supposed that was fair enough. He had always thought that the divine surely cared little for the affairs of men. “Do you have a name, then?” he asked, reaching over to his boots to begin to tug them on. Though the creature before him was bare, in only his wet shirt and trousers, he could not help but feel somewhat underdressed for the encounter. “Something I could call you by?”

“I have many,” they responded. “The one I chose for myself is Deus.”

“Deus,” Ragnar echoed, and the very name felt strange, divine, on his tongue. He finished tying the laces of his boots and moved on to his greaves. “Then I’ll call you Deus, if that’s what you prefer.”

“It is,” they said, matter of factly. And then; “What brought you to return here?”

Ragnar glanced up from where he had begun to tie his greaves. They had moved closer, and stood calmly over him, their hands folded behind their fair back and their head tilted to one side. They were the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, but he did not know why he may have expected otherwise, from a thing from the heavens above. “I don’t know. The instruments of the heavens, I suppose. Fate,” he offered finally in response. And then, when they simply quirked a brow, he sighed. “A horse.”

Deus smiled. “A horse,” they echoed. They sounded amused. “Where is your horse?”

“Waiting for me. Downstream,” Ragnar answered, rising to put his vest and tassets on. Gods above, he sounded mad, didn’t he? “She… comes for me when I need her, and she takes me where I need to go.”

The creature giggled at this, then cocked their head to the other side. “That is what horses do, yes.”

“That’s what I said to her,” he mumbled, though he could feel his own cheeks flushing beneath the black paint smeared and dripping beneath his eyes. “And yourself? What brought you here?”

At this, they became a bit more serious, nearly playful expression becoming suddenly rather somber.

“Something called to me. Something, or someone, from here,” they explained, breaking his gaze for the first time. “They sounded like they were hurting very badly. I have to find them, so I can be with them. I have to answer their call. I was waiting for them to call out to me again, so that I may have some idea of where I may find them, but their voice seems to have gone silent. I hope I’m not too late…”

Ragnar could only look at them for a time. “Do you know who it is you’re searching for?” he asked.

Deus offered him something between a grimace and a smile. “Things are never so simple.”

Ragnar reached down to pick his coat up off the ground, considering their plight for a time. He was there, with them, for a reason, surely. Perhaps he already knew who it was they were searching for? To call out to the heavens, to possess a voice loud enough to reach the ears of the divine, that would surely need a strong spirit, not to mention intense determination. What could be so powerful as that?

Oh. He hated the answer his mind offered him, but it was an answer, and a likely one, nonetheless.

“Well… There is an Orphan Beast,” he began, and he hated himself for speaking its name, but he stomached the feeling best he could. “They are horrible, and mighty beasts. Even little things like thinking about them and speaking their name turns their eyes toward you. But they are miserable, even at the best of times, either angry or weeping. An old woman on the other end of the forest keeps one in a cage as an attraction at her midnight carnival. She should have never meddled with it. Perhaps the beast was calling to you, perhaps it wants for you to come and—” He swallowed hard. “—free it.”

Deus seemed to consider this. And then, they perked up again, and gave a little hop, rising up onto the tips of their toes. “It would make sense, yes. Especially if you’re frightened of it,” they agreed, almost teasingly. “I think I'll go there, then. It’s better than nowhere at all. Thank you, Ragnar.”

They turned as if to leave, and Ragnar did not want them to go, not yet.

“Take me with you, if you please. It would be dangerous to go by your lonesome. I could bring you to the carnival. Bring you to the beast,” he offered, the words spilling from his mouth before he could even contemplate them. Rather than going back on his words after realizing what he’d said, however, he found himself digging his heels in. He didn’t much like the thought of anyone wandering a strange place by their lonesome, certainly not while black flags still flew. “I could show you the way there. Best I could.”

Deus paused and glanced at him over their shoulder. “But you’re frightened of it,” they pointed out.

Ragnar swallowed. “I am,” he confessed. There was no point lying about it. “But still, take me with you. I'm old, and I've got little else to live for. What’s a final quest before I put my sword away?”

“Oh, Ragnar. You are not so old. Not as old as I, at least. But putting a sword away is always a good thing, I think,” Deus replied, beautiful beyond belief. “You seem a brave man, and I admit, I’d like to meet your horse.” They offered him a soft smile. “You may come with me, if you would like.”

“I would,” Ragnar replied, again without truly considering the words before they escaped him.

And this time, when they turned to leave, Ragnar set to gathering the last of his things up from the bank of the river, to follow them. When he rose again, they stood a short distance away on a moss-covered rock, looking back at him. The very daylight seemed as if it were drawn to their slight form.

“You said you left your horse downstream?” they called. “Will we go this way?”

“Downstream, yes,” he confirmed, a ghost of a grin on his lips. “You’ve a keen ear.” 

They smiled at that. And then, they turned and they started off into the forest, following the river.

***

It was a little difficult to keep up with them. It was like chasing a fox. Though he was far larger and his stride far longer than theirs, where Ragnar traipsed through the brush and seemed to struggle to even take a step, Deus treaded with ease, without so much as a frown upon their face. They took pause every so often and waited for him, looking back as if to make sure he was still there behind them.

He was glad they waited. It had been a very long time since he’d had any company, and though this new companionship would surely be short-lived, he could not help but be glad for it.

“Where do you come from?” they asked, once he had caught up again. “You seem well traveled."

Under their gaze, calm and welcoming as the first stretch of the morning, part of Ragnar wanted to tell them. To bare to them his very soul, to tell them of all that had happened to him, his people— nay, his family— in the past few decades. But he had come to know such things as unwise, and rude, to boot. And besides, he dared not reach for the part of him that remained coiled around such painful things, gnashing its teeth at the very notion of being touched. “That’s a very long story,” he said finally.

Deus smiled at that. “Stories often feel much longer in our heads than in words,” they replied. “But I won’t make you tell me any stories you don’t want to. We know what we are, some sometimes the rest of the world forgets. Sometimes keeping yourself to yourself is wise. Keep your mystery, and I’ll keep mine.”

Ragnar gave them a nod of understanding. “That sounds very fair.”

“Until then, perhaps you could tell me a shorter story,” they suggested, walking backwards, now. It was a little easier to keep up with them, while they ambled so, though he found himself a little concerned they may step backwards into the river. And yet, their foot never slipped, they never wandered too close to the edge for comfort. He calmed over time. “Do you know any good stories, Ragnar?”

Ragnar thought of the hundreds of stories Caswallawn had told him, a long time ago. Tales passed down for generations of Eosphorites, stories old and sacred. He knew all of them practically by heart. He had been diligent in making sure he recalled every one of them, after the old man had died.

“You’ll have to forgive me,” he said after a moment. “I cannot think of any good ones.”

He was not fit to tell those stories. He doubted that he ever would be.

Deus did not look terribly joyful at that response. “Oh,” they said, not unkindly. “Very well, then.”

He had always been rather weak in the face of sad faces, and Deus’s was a particularly compelling one. Ragnar sighed at the sight of it and scratched at the back of his neck. “Well, perhaps I will recall one soon, here, however,” he offered, his voice hardly louder than a deep mutter. “Perhaps.”

They perked up a little at that, thankfully.


	4. The Orphan Beast

Ragnar rode into town again on the back of his mare, and his companion was small enough to sit in front of him, settled quietly between his arms with both their legs tucked to one side, on the saddle.

Ragnar lifted his gaze to the black flags, still flying overhead, and then let it fall back down to Deus.

Worry began to set in, and Ragnar did admit he was a bit of a worrier. He could not help it, at that point, life had trained him in a very brutal way to be cautious, as best he could. “Deus,” he began, as the shadow of the looming flags fell over them. He tugged at his cloak to swaddle their bare, nearly luminous form in it as he spoke. “Please, listen to me, and speak quietly. Where do you come from?”

Deus glanced up over their shoulder at him, their expression puzzled. “I came from the heavens.”

A small wagon of men, dressed in horribly familiar black armor, approached. Ragnar lifted an arm to urge Deus closer to himself. They shuffled backward in the saddle, until felt they were well hidden in his cloak. When he spoke again, his voice became hushed. “You did not,” he murmured.

Deus did not understand. “I am what I am,” they replied. “What I am and where I come from—”

“Hush!” Ragnar clapped a hand over Deus’s mouth, then, his voice an urgent whisper, and it was so sudden and forthright that Deus could not parry the movement. Ragnar clutched them close to himself as the wagon, filled to its very rickety wooden brim with knights of the Holy See, lumbered past them, riding off in the opposite direction down the road. As soon as it had passed, Ragnar released his grip upon Deus, reaching instead to take the reins again. He allowed himself a glance back at the caravan.

“Please, try to keep your voice down, as much as you can,” he murmured.

Deus lifted a hand to their mouth, then, shocked still. In all their immortality, in all the many, many years they had existed as they were, no man, however foolish, had ever presumed to touch them, let alone interrupt them in the middle of a sentence. They shifted again in the saddle, this time to shoot him a look.

“You shouldn’t touch me without permission,” they scolded, albeit quieter, now.

To their surprise, Ragnar looked guilty even before they turned to chide him. “Forgive me,” he said simply, glancing briefly again at the wagon over his shoulder. “Disrespect was the lesser evil.”

Deus softened at this. They leaned around Ragnar, following his gaze. “Those men are dangerous?”

“I’m not certain. What I am certain of is that nothing good ever happens, when they’re about,” he grumbled in reply, turning back to face the town. Still swaddled in his cloak, Deus lifted their head to peek out at the black flags flying overhead. “I would not risk your safety with a man in that armor, suffice to say,” added Ragnar as they moved, his voice still a whisper, now keeping careful watch for wandering eyes, “You come from the heavens, but not here. Not where these people can hate you for it.”

Deus took a moment to peer at the people Ragnar seemed so wary of. Mundane people, just simply going about their daily life, it seemed to them, shopping and eating and chatting, but Deus understood his caution better than perhaps he’d have guessed. History often proved itself rather circular.

They turned to look at him again, their lips parted. “You are not lonely by choice.”

Ragnar said nothing for a good while, simply stared ahead, and it was confirmation enough.

“There was a crusade against my people. Against a great many people. It was nearly… twenty years ago, now,” he offered finally, voice strained, the shadows of the black flags heavy on his shoulders. “Those black flags belong to the Holy See, and the Holy See belongs to the Creed of Gaia. Best I can understand it, the Creed has a College, or Council, or something of the like, of people they call Swiftlets, and those Swiftlets chose a warlike Pontiff to lead them. Pontiff Alexander, they called him.”

He spat the name as if it were a curse, lips curled back into something of a weary snarl.

“We called him kroaziadeg, the crusader. He raised the Holy See against my people and our cousins and people we knew nothing of, and the Creed burnt our homes and our families to the ground, and they put their own roots down in the ashes, even built the crusader a palace around the greatest of my cousins’s stone circles and claimed it as their own. Suits them. All the Creed ever thinks of is dirt.”

Deus frowned and turned their gaze away from him, saddened. “What made them take pause?”

“My teacher. Caswallawn. The old man and the crusader killed each other in battle, years ago,” he answered, rather curtly. His heart was heavy with the weight of his own lie. “The crusader is dead. We’ve finally enjoyed some peace because of it. The new Pontiff, Maria, once spoke for people like me, but I’ve heard she barely speaks at all, anymore, and when she does, it’s not much more than nonsense. She’s an old woman, now, gone senile. She may as well already be gone, and I’d wager the Holy See knows it. The Crusade never ended, only paused to give them time to think of newer, better ways to murder us.”

Deus said nothing for a time. “Why does she hold on?” they inquired. “The Pontiff.”

They said it as if though could have known her personally, somehow. Ragnar offered them a shrug of his shoulders. “Unfinished business, I suppose. Maybe she just doesn’t want to die, yet. Who knows,” he replied. “Perhaps her ghost will haunt the palace, after she can hold on no longer.”

Deus made a soft sound of understanding. Then, quietly; “You are a brave man indeed, Ragnar.”

Ragnar could only blink at them for a moment. He hadn’t expected such a comment. “No, no, I… I wish I could have done a few things differently,” he confessed, turning his gaze from them.

“If you hadn’t done things the way you did,” they said, “you wouldn’t have been able to regret it.”

That one took a good few moments for him to think through. Finally, Ragnar quirked a dark brow and looked at them. “Are you fucking with me under the guise of being wise? You must be.”

Deus laughed at this. “I would never,” they promised him, earnestly enough.

Ragnar cracked a ghost of a smile and tugged on his cloak until their head was completely hidden from sight. It had been a great while since he’d discussed such things with anybody. It was nice to be able to joke after speaking of it. Company was nice, especially company he felt he could trust.

“The midnight carnival is not far from here,” he explained, lifting his face to look ahead. “It will be safer for the both of us if you keep your head low until we’ve left town. It won’t be long.”

Hidden away in his cloak, Ragnar could feel Deus give a little nod of their head. He smiled.

*** 

The night was dark, and the crescent moon was beginning to creep up into the sky, but the time was still far from midnight. Mama Farfalee’s Midnight Carnival was empty, eerie in all its silence.

The cages had been stripped of their coverings, revealing the strange and peculiar creatures locked inside to their eyes. Midnight crept slowly closer, after all. Deus looked into each circus cart as they passed, their brows furrowing somewhat, as if confused. They turned their gaze back to Ragnar and cocked their head to one side. “What is all this?” they inquired. They had the good sense to whisper.

“‘Creatures of the heavens, brought to the earth,’” grumbled Ragnar. He’d heard the old hag spew the phrase time and time again. It had practically been burnt into the back of his head. “Mythical beasts long since hunted down or disappeared. Mythical beasts that never even existed at all,” he continued, and he could hear the bitterness in his own voice. “Mama Farfalee’s Midnight Carnival is the only place in the world you could ever encounter them, now. A little bit of sin for the town to feast on.”

He took pause for a moment, then, as he came upon a cage with nine little fox-like creatures inside. Each of the nine sported a pair of mottled feathered wings upon its back, and they all wandered anxiously about the cage, big eyes staring fearfully up at him. She had made her nain, it seemed.

He looked around briefly to make certain they were alone, and then, gently, Ragnar placed a hand at Deus’s back and urged them closer to the cage. “What do you see in the cage?”

Deus only had to glance into the cage to give him an answer. “I see nine little foxes,” they said, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. They turned to another cage, where a massive winged beast with a serene human face laid. “That one is a seedy, toothless old hart.” Then again to a third, where something akin to massive cockerel paced its space. “And that is but a rooster with a backwards foot.”

Ragnar had expected as much, but he was nonetheless a little surprised how remarkably easily they could see through the old crone’s magics. “The old hag can only disguise, far as I know, and only for those who want to see what she peddles,” he agreed. “Only eyes that want to see a nain will see a nain.”

“It is not so difficult to see through her deceptions. I cannot even see the illusion you speak of, but I can feel it. Nothing can ever be truly changed, not like this, not by mortal hands, nor divine. The only true change comes from within.” Deus then turned and looked up at him. “But what do you see?”

Ragnar ventured a glance back at the winged foxes. “I see nain,” he murmured.

Before Deus could respond, however, or even truly react to his words, there came a terrible, horrible noise from not too frightfully far away. It was all at once like the sound of a dinner knife scraping against the side of a glass bottle and the keen of a wounded elk and the rumbling of a lion. It felt not so dissimilar from the sound a man makes when he dies, though the sound itself was very different. Nearly instinctively, Ragnar reached for his sword, but he knew that it was useless to draw it. An Orphan Beast was not like a dragon or a korrigan or cewri or the like. No man had ever killed an Orphan Beast.

Deus blinked and looked towards the sound, perfectly calm. “That one is real,” they remarked.

“Yes” Ragnar nodded in confirmation and swallowed hard. “That is what we are here for. Damn it all, I don’t know how she managed to get that thing in a cage, but she should have never meddled with it.”

Deus lifted one hand to place over their chest. “It sounds as if it is in pain,” they frowned.

“Let us just hope she isn’t poking the thing with a stick.” He let go of the hilt of his sword, hesitant as he was to do it, and he instead reached out to take Deus’s hand. “Come with me,” he said.

Deus took his hand, and Ragnar quickly but quietly lead them between two of the circus cages. He once again slung his dark cloak around them as the very both of them peered around the edge to see what may be happening. It was not difficult to hear a pair of voices from where the two stood.

Before the Orphan Beast’s cage stood not only Mama Farfalee herself, but her companion, a short, hunched over man with oily, greying black hair and a matted, unkempt beard that seemed to grow mostly from his throat, rather than on his chin. He wore an eyepatch, but Ragnar had always had a hunch that it was merely another prop for Farfalee’s performance, and that he did not actually need it. The man wrung his knobby hands anxiously under the Orphan Beast’s blind, milky, terrible stare.

“I don’t care how many damned spells you say you’ve got on it,” he whimpered. “I don’t want to be near it, Mama! It thinks about what it’s going to do to us all the time! I know it does!”

As if on cue, the Orphan Beast let out another horrible keen, and the man cried out and cowered.

“Get rid of it, Mama!” he pleaded, reaching out to tug at her sleeves. “You’ve got to get rid of it!”

Mama Farfalee scowled and brandished her walking staff at him. “Now, you be silent, you absolute git! It won’t be breaking out tonight, not for many nights, not unless it grows thumbs to pick its lock with. I won’t let it. Mama won’t let it,” she snapped. “I’ll sooner quit show business than let that beast go!”

Deus glanced up at Ragnar and cocked their head to one side. “Who is he?” they whispered.

“The man? That is her grand-nephew, Spurt,” Ragnar muttered. He hadn’t seen much of the man, but he was even less fond of him than he was of Farfalee. He paused. “What is that look for?”

Deus had quirked a brow at him. “‘Spurt’?” they echoed, almost disbelieving.

Ragnar could not help but crack a slight grin at that. “You asked his name, and I gave it. It isn’t my fault it’s a bad one,” he responded. “Now hush, or you’ll have to make his acquaintance.”

Deus laughed at that, but the pair’s moment of good humor did not last terribly long. Suddenly as it cried, the Orphan Beast shook its massive form, sending its cage rocking from side to side, shrieking all the while. Ragnar stiffened, cringing at the sound, and just as soon as they’d seen him, old Spurt went running off into the darkness, without even a scream or one more word to his great aunt.

Mama Farfalee was far less perturbed. “You can try all you like,” she cackled, lifting her staff to jab the beast through the bars with it. “You won’t be getting anywhere with all that.”

The Orphan Beast made another awful, mournful noise. It continued to thrash uselessly in its cage.

The old woman merely chuckled and turned, leaning her weight on her rickety staff again, and her eyes fell directly upon where Ragnar and Deus hid. “Come, now! There is no use hiding from Mama, not in her own carnival,” she sneered and pointed a finger, trembling with withering age, towards them. “The Orphan Beast is just as immortal as you are, lass, and even it couldn’t hide from Mama.”

Ragnar reached to draw Deus closer to himself, but Deus broke from him and stepped out into the open night air, walking quite calmly and with purpose. They spared him only a glance over their shoulder, and the look on their untroubled face was a wordless beckoning to follow them.

Reluctantly, Ragnar rose to his feet and followed at their heels. There was no use in hiding, he knew.

None of them uttered a word even as they met before the Orphan Beast’s cage. Ragnar made a bit of a show of reaching for the hilt of his sword, in case the still thrashing beast managed to break loose or the old hag tried anything tricksy. He kept his eye on her as Deus passed her, their attention on the circus cage rather than the old woman. They lifted a slender hand to touch the writhing beast with.

“Deus,” he protested. It was somewhere between a warning and a simply expression of his terror.

Deus paused to offer him a reassuring look, then reached out and gently let their hand come to rest upon the beast’s muzzle. Even though the monster had a mouth full of dagger-sharp teeth, even though it had snarled and hissed and flailed so greatly, even though its milky eyes burned with panic and hatred, it seemed to soften at their gentle touch, under their gaze. The beast ceased its thrashing and made a quiet, less awful noise than before, almost as if purring. Deus hushed it, petting up and down its muzzle. “There, there,” they murmured, a smile playing across their lips. “We haven’t come here to hurt you.”

Ragnar could hardly believe it. Perhaps he should have been less surprised than he was, yet still…

“Interesting. Interesting, indeed,” Mama Farfalee sneered, then, and the very sound of her croaking voice spurred him from his awe in an instant. She turned her gaze up toward Ragnar, and, irritatingly, her expression indicated she was all business. “How long have you had this creature, boy?”

He would not even let her begin. “They are not for me. Nor are they for you, you crazy old hag,” he warned, stalking past her to venture a little closer to Deus, and to the Orphan Beast.

The massive beast turned its head and bristled at his approach. Ragnar froze, but still, the creature’s lips curled back to show off its rows of terrible, horrible teeth, its hackles raised, a rumble rising deep from within its feathered chest. It calmed a little again, however, when Deus reached out and urged its face back towards themselves. “Don’t worry yourself over him,” they whispered. “He’s my friend.”

Ragnar again began to inch toward Deus, and this time, the beast didn’t bare its awful teeth at him.

Deus continued to pet and soothe the Orphan Beast. “I am happy I came here,” they said, speaking now to Ragnar as he came to a halt at their side, “but this isn’t the voice that called to me.”

There was a part of Ragnar that was glad for it. He did not want to part from them so soon.

“I see. Very well.” He bent a little to look them in their eyes. “I will still help you find them, if you’d have me,” he promised, voice low in hopes of escaping Mama Farfalee’s ears.

Deus smiled at that. “I would. For the time being, at least,” they replied. It was far better than a no.

Their gaze then wandered past Ragnar and over to Mama Farfalee, who had begun hobbling closer to the two. “You should not boast, dear old woman,” they began, finally addressing her. Their pale golden hair seemed to glimmer in the moonlight. “It is as he says. The beast and I are not for you.”

Farfalee looked nearly incredulous at that. The old woman scoffed.

“Well, who are you for, then?” she demanded, lifting her staff to point at them with it. Ragnar took a step forward to stand between her and Deus, but Farfalee paid him little heed. “Do you think those fools in the village would know you, if not for me? They know nothing of even their own Gaia! All they know is what their Creed tells them. It takes illusion to show them the real, hard truth, these days!”

Still resting its head in Deus’s hands, the Orphan Beast hissed, rumbled at the sound of her shout.

Deus shook their head. They seemed almost to sigh. “You know better,” they said. “Let it go back to its forests, as you would let a fallow dear roam. Let us all go, or, at the least— if you are wise— at least this parentless beast. Your death is in my hands, and I will not be able to protect you from it.”

“Hah!” the old woman snorted. “Oh, it will kill me, I know it will kill me. But it will remember little old Mama Farfalee for the whole of its existence, and that is enough for me. I won’t have beauty forever. I won’t have my name in some big book in some big tower. But the beast will remember me. That is enough for me. Enough for me.” She leaned her weight onto her staff, her thin lips curling upward into a crooked sneer, nearly a grimace. “If you were wise, mystic, you would be glad if it crushed that pretty pale neck of yours with the very jaws you pet. It would be far more merciful than what comes, tonight.”

Deus paused at that, and ventured a glance over to Ragnar, who bristled at the old crone’s nebulous rambling. He rounded on her, dark brows furrowing. “What comes tonight?” he demanded.

The old woman simply smiled up at him, her crooked grin bordering upon menacing.

Ragnar took a step forward, his lip curling back. “What comes tonight, you old hag?” he repeated.

It did not take very long after that to hear the sound of an arrow flying.

He had not heard the sound in years, and yet Ragnar’s reaction was instinctual. His body seemed as if to know what was happening before his mind did, leaping into action before he even wholly understood what it was he was doing. “Look out!” He seized Deus into one arm to shield them with his own form, and he ducked his head low. They squeaked as he took hold of him, too surprised to protest.

Not even an instant after he did, he heard the arrow hit its mark, and then, the pop and crackle of burning wood. When he lifted his head, the arrow, swaddled in oil and flame, jutted out of the top of the Orphan Beast’s cage, and it took only but an instant to set the decaying wood ablaze.

The Orphan Beast broke from Deus’s hand and let out an awful keen, slinking away from the blaze.

The old woman cackled. “The Holy See can gnash its teeth all it wants,” she declared, an echo of her very words from the day before, “it won’t be the thing that kills Mama Farfalee.”

She turned, hobbling off towards the center of her midnight circus, and as she did, another arrow flew, this time setting fire to the massive, worn banner proudly displaying the name of Farfalee’s carnival. This too soon erupted into flames, bathing the circus in terrible, twisting orange light.

Just at the edge of the tree line, only barely lit by moonlight, a black flag unfurled from the darkness.

Ragnar swore and pushed Deus into the space between the Orphan Beast’s cart and the cage beside it, paying the dreadful creature’s horrid noises no heed. “Run!” he cried. “Run, now!”

But Deus did not run, did not so much as start off. “Ragnar, the cages!” they protested.

Ragnar glanced over his shoulder and saw that yet another of the old woman’s circus cars had been set alight, this one the cage that held the rooster with the twisted foot. It crowed and cawed and frantically beat its wings in panic, the illusion upon it wavering amidst the heat of the churning flame.

“They must think they’re real,” Deus cried, reaching to clutch at his sleeve. “They’ll die, Ragnar."

“I…” Ragnar hesitated, thinking of the little foxes he’d brought to Farfalee the day before, but then the sound of arrows being loosed again and the not too distant cries of the Holy See shook him back into reality. “They’re just animals,” he said, heart heavy, as he pushed them around to the backside of the cage.

Deus broke from his hands. Ragnar moved to grab them should they flee from him, but once out of his grasp, they stood at his side and looked him in his face. “You are just an animal, too.”

Ragnar had no retort for that. He did not reach to take hold of them again.

With that, they turned and they dropped to their knees in front of the Orphan Beast’s cage, taking the lock up into their hands. They studied it for a moment that felt much longer than it actually was, then lifted one hand and drew from the very firelight itself a mimicry of a skeleton key.

Only then did Ragnar begin to protest. “Don’t,” he hissed. “Don’t, it will kill you if you set it free!”

Deus did not heed his warning. “It won’t. Dying is easy, it’s living that’s the trick. If I don’t risk it,” they assured him, slipping the light-forged key into the lock and turning it, “I would have a wasted soul.”

The instant the lock had been undone, the beast surged forwards and burst out of the cage, sending the cage door flying and Deus stumbling backwards into Ragnar’s arms. The beast shook itself of ash and embers and stretched out its horrible, mangled, feathered form. It looked then upon the mortified Ragnar and the ineffable Deus in his arms, and its tail thrashed, its lip curled back to show its teeth.

Ragnar fumbled for his sword, but Deus caught his arm and stopped him, their pale eyes still on the massive, frightful beast looming over them. The Orphan Beast rumbled and opened its mouth to show off its second set of teeth, tongue lolling from its mouth, dripping with smoke tinged saliva.

“Please,” breathed Deus, a hand still clutching at Ragnar’s wrist. “Swear you’ll set the others free.”

The Orphan Beast simply stared for a time, and then, closed its white eyes and shook the soot from its head. Then, in a moment Ragnar hardly believed, it craned its head for one last scratch behind the ear from Deus, and it spread its massive wings and it took off, sending black feathers flying.

Ragnar felt as if he’d just gone into cardiac arrest. “Heavens above, I never would have thought…”

A smile spread across Deus’s face. “It doesn’t much matter what you think about me,” they replied, and they took his big, trembling hand up in their own. He looked down at them, and despite the burning fire all around them, despite the Holy See, despite the very creature from his nightmares flying overhead, their touch calmed him, softened the pounding of his heart. “I think it’s time for us to go.”

They left the midnight carnival as it went up in flames, keeping low and moving quickly so the Holy See would not catch sight of them. Arrows flew, fire crackled and popped, animals cried, and the burning cages groaned and splintered as the Orphan Beast tore the doors from their very hinges. Whatever arrows were loosed at the beast seemed almost to be swallowed in the dark of its feathers. It did not seem to even truly care about the measly mortal knights that brandished their swords against it.

He heard Mama Farfalee’s laughter through the chaos, then, and Ragnar glanced over his shoulder.

“Mine, you’re mine! You will always be mine!” she called, standing amongst her burning circus, her eyes upon the sky. She wore the biggest smile he’d ever seen. “If you kill me, you’re still mine!”

The Orphan Beast, a winged shadow of death itself, whipped around at the sound of her voice, and it leapt down from the cage upon which it perched, stalking towards her. Ragnar watched as it reared back like a snake poised to strike, as if it were savoring the moment. Despite himself, he cried out.

“Don’t look,” Deus interrupted, pulling upon his hand. “You don’t have to look.”

He could hear its teeth snap shut behind him. Ragnar could feel his heart beginning to thunder all over again. “The old woman,” he stammered. “Heavens, I didn’t want it to. I didn’t want—”

“She chose her death long ago. It is the fate she wants. She was sick with it. You cannot protect her from it,” responded Deus, and their voice was the only calm and steady thing in the world. “Come. Come with me. Life is for the living, and death is for the dead, and you are not dead.”

Ragnar nodded in wordless understanding and let his fingers interlock with theirs. “We have to go.”

Deus pulled him into the forest, away from the terror at his back. “We have to go.”


	5. Swift of Foot and Spirit

The burning circus at their backs lit their way as they ran through the forest, hands still interlocked.

Ragnar’s feet slipped in the fallen leaves upon the ground, slick with the chill of night, as he pulled Deus behind him. His stride was longer, much longer, but they did not seem to have much trouble keeping up with him. The cold night air was a shock to his chest and lungs, his breath hot and nervous and coming in short, heaving spurts. He was getting too old for this. Or perhaps he was just out of shape.

They left the forest behind, but somehow, some part of Ragnar knew that that would be easy part.

He nearly did not want to stop, fearful that his weariness may catch up with him, but when he saw the faint light of burning torches in the town ahead, stalking the streets, he nonetheless dropped low and slowed his pace, indicating with one hand for Deus to do the same. He could hear them shouting to each other up ahead. All of them men, some voices more familiar to his ears than others.

Ragnar felt sick to his stomach. Perhaps sensing his nerves, seeing his hesitation, Deus gave his hand a wordless squeeze, and it felt as if they were the only solid thing left in all the world.

He turned to look at them, then, and they tilted their head to one side. “Those men,” he whispered, pointing a finger to the torches in the near distance, “are hunting, and if they caught us, they would kill us. They won’t know what you are, if they see you, but they’ll know you aren’t like them. They’ll feel it, just as I did. And that is enough for them to hate you. Stay close, please. We’ll keep to the alleys.”

Deus said nothing for a time, pale eyes wandering to the torchlit figures in the distance. They didn’t seem too terribly frightened, though the look on their face was far from serene.

Finally, they turned their gaze toward Ragnar again. “How very gratifying,” they offered, somewhat breathlessly, “to be hated by the right people.” They then nodded in understanding.

Ragnar let go of Deus’s hand for only an instant, to draw his sword, quietly and slowly as he could.

He lead them from the forest into the stone walls, ducking away from light of the villagers’s torches and into the dark, mucky back alleyways of the town. He grasped the hilt of Caswallawn’s longsword with one white-knuckled hand and clutched to Deus’s with the other, both for their sake and his own.

He could hear the shouting in the distance, could barely make out the fierce, awful curses they spat.

“Wait.” Suddenly, Deus reached up and took Ragnar by the arm, pulling him back into the shadow of the home they had ducked behind. It tore him from his thoughts, and yet it still took him a moment to notice the flickering of passing torchlight. Shit. He’d lost focus. Shit, that had been careless of him. But he knew these people, these voices. He knew them, and yet still, if they found him with Deus…

“F-Forgive me,” he sputtered once the awful orange firelight had passed, barely recalling to whisper.

Deus let go of his arm, and they regarded him with ineffable temperance. “Be calm,” they said. He could only wish to be as composed as they managed to be. “I will help you through this.”

Their words served well enough to steady his pounding heart, but not enough to banish the lump in his throat. Ragnar swallowed hard, in hopes of being rid of it. No luck. “Stay close,” he said, quietly, as he lead them onward, between houses and under stairways, keeping a careful eye out for firelight.

And then, around the corner, the awful figure of a man came stalking.

It was too sudden— there wasn’t nearly enough time to turn around and find another alley to duck into. Before the light of his torch could reach them, Ragnar took Deus and his sword into his cloak and he pressed himself up against the wall between two pilasters, ducking his head low, and he held as still as he could. He dared not even breath, even as he could see torchlight enter his peripheral. With his free arm, he drew Deus closer to himself, nearly instinctively, and within his cloak, he felt their hands grasp his shirt.

The figure paused, the embers upon his torch snapping and flames dancing. He lowered himself to the ground, and he placed his palm flat against the muddied earth, whispering a prayer under his breath. He simply crouched there for what felt like hours— horrible, horrible, breathless hours.

And then; “Who’s there?” someone called. He did not know who.

The words made Ragnar’s heart still in his chest. He tensed, shifted so that his sword was ready, but then, he felt Deus place a hand over his where he grasped he hilt. Reluctantly, he stilled, his nerves wound tight, shaking in every bone. Sure enough, however, the figure crouching in the mud stood.

“It’s just me, Ed,” the figure replied, waving his torch over his head. Ragnar knew the voice. He had found the man’s two sons a stick to play ball with, days ago. “Wanted to say a quick prayer.”

A moment passed before they were swallowed by the dark again.

Ragnar swallowed hard, his breath shaking upon his exhale. He let Deus part from him, reaching to take their hand up in his again as they stepped backwards, his dark cloak falling from their bare shoulders. They seemed nearly to glow a little against the darkness, their freckles flickering like stars.

It was a good while before either dared even to whisper again. “Where are we going?” asked Deus.

Ragnar did not have a very good answer. Anywhere. Anywhere that isn’t here, he thought. “Into the forest,” he said, giving their hand a tug. “On the other side of town. Come on, quickly as you can.”

He guided them onwards down the alleyway, until they came upon a stone wall. A dead end. There was an old, worn wooden door beside it, however, and when Ragnar tried its handle, he found the lock so old and rusted, that it did not even work. The door creaked open. Quickly, quietly, he ushered Deus inside and shut it behind them, plunging them into an even greater darkness than they had been in before.

“A wine cellar?” murmured Deus, their eyes wandering as if unaffected by the dark.

Ragnar could hardly see their glow against the blackness, but after his eyes adjusted to it somewhat, he found it was, indeed, a wine cellar. The town tavern’s wine cellar. He had been down here a handful of times before. There was another door, if he recalled correctly, on the other side of the cellar, and the edge of the town was not far beyond it. They were nearly there. If they could reach the woods…

He started off in search of the other door, gently tugging Deus along with him, hand in hand. The darkness seemed only to intensify the deeper he went into it, however. He dragged his feet, hoping dearly that he would not step on and smash a bottle. Heavens, he was getting nowhere with this.

Ragnar glanced at the faint light that was Deus over his shoulder. “Can you see another door?”

“Yes,” they confirmed. And with that, they wandered ahead of him and took the lead, guiding him by his hand through the darkness and taking care to quietly warn him if he were about to step too close to a stray pallet or bottle on the floor. With their guidance, it was not long until Ragnar began to see the dim light of night, spilling through a window in the stone, and then, a second old, wooden door.

He tried the door, but he found it would not open. He leaned his full weight into it, pushed with all his might, even rammed into it with his shoulder a few times, and yet still, it would not so much as budge. “Damned old locks,” he hissed, reaching up to rub his shoulder with. “It must be jammed.”

“…And we can’t go back the way we came, nor out the front door,” Deus remarked.

Ragnar nodded his head in confirmation, already beginning to consider what could be done about it. He would have to break down the door. It would make lot of noise, far much more noise than he was at all comfortable with making, but they didn’t have very many options. And the woods were not so terribly far beyond it. As far as risks went, it was not a horrible one. He didn’t have much choice.

Just as he backed up and readied to charge, however; “Wait,” said Deus, lifting a hand. He waited.

They turned their eyes to the window, then to Ragnar. “Try to force your sword between the door and the wall, under the lock,” they explained. They pointed at the window. “If you lift me up, I can climb through the window and help you from the other side. We may be able to jimmy it open.”

Well, it was certainly a better plan than merely breaking the door down. It was worth a try, at least.

And so, Ragnar lifted Deus up and helped them up into and through the window. Once he’d heard them safely land on the other side— “Here.”— he stripped his cloak off and tossed it through the window after them. “Wrap it around the blade, so you won’t cut yourself,” he explained, before he promptly made his way back over to the old door and began to wedge his blade through the door. It took some time, but it was far from the most difficult thing he’d ever done. “Are you ready?” he asked after a moment.

“Yes,” came Deus’s muffled response, and on the count of three, the both of them pulled upwards.

It did not take long for the old, rusty lock to snap. Ragnar, slowly and carefully, drew his sword back through the door, and when he pushed on it, it swung open with no resistance. And there on the other side of the door was Deus, holding his cloak against their chest, a proud grin upon their lips.

Ragnar could not help but grin a little, reaching to take his cloak back from them. “Clever soul,” he remarked as he slung the cloak about his shoulders again. “We’re nearly there. Quickly, n—”

“Ragnar?” called a voice, then, girlish and noisy. “How did you get down here?”

Ragnar whirled at the sound, and to his terror, there stood Beatrice some distance behind him, wax candle in hand, looking at him as though he had just asked her what color the earth below was.

“What are you doing?” Beatrice asked. “The men are searching for infidels. You should be inside!”

Ragnar turned his sword on her, and he raised his free arm to shield Deus with. He did not want to hurt her, but more than that, he did not want her to hurt Deus. “Don’t come any closer,” he warned. And, when she took a step towards him nonetheless, confused; “I mean it, Beatrice!”

“Ragnar,” Deus protested, reaching out a hand to lay over his sword hand. He did not budge.

Beatrice looked past him, at Deus, her expression still utterly baffled. “Who is that?” she asked. And then, realization dawning on her face, expression darkening; “Ragnar, _what_ is that?”

“Run,” he breathed to Deus over his shoulder. Deus looked from him to Beatrice, simply blinking.

Beatrice lifted her lantern, then, and cupped her free hand around her mouth. “Over here! They’re over here!” she cried, howling to the hunt, wherever it was they were lurking. “Come quickly!”

_“Run, now!”_ Ragnar cried, snatching Dues’s hand up in his and breaking into a sprint for the woods.

***

It did not take long for them to escape from the mud and stone of the town into the grass, and it did not take long after that for them to reach the trees, but Ragnar dared not glance behind himself. He heard shouting, he heard spat curses, and the thunder of feet close behind. He heard arrows flying, could see the silhouettes of other people, chasing them through the trees, flanking, gaining on them.

“Soldiers, this way!” someone called. He knew their voice, but he didn’t care to recall whose it was.

“They came from that old woman’s goblin market!” someone else yelled. “Move! Get them!”

The pines stretched high overhead, creaking, laughing against the pull of the wind, the mist parted for them as they ran. He could see torchlight out of the corners of his eyes, could see the long, misshapen shadows of their pursuers through the trees. He could barely even draw breath.

The earth rumbled suddenly, seemed to thunder and quake beneath his feet as he ran.

“Ragnar,” heaved Deus, then, holding tight to his hand, and for the first time, there was something akin to fear in their voice. “Ragnar, the ground—!” they began, but as they spoke, the very ground began to shake again, and this time, the sound was accompanied by a horrible scream.

Torchlight cut open the sky. Deus stumbled, but Ragnar was quick to pull them to their feet again.

“Don’t stop, not here!” he cried. “Straight on, carry straight on!”

Neither of them dared to stop running, no matter how the earth beneath them shook. The ground rumbled, twisted and churned beneath the pair’s feet, and the sound of it was like the howling of thunder from the very heavens. The trees screamed and splintered under the merciless force of it, roots shaking in the dirt and branches falling free from the trunk. Ragnar barely comprehended what was happening, but it was relentless, affording them no quarter, allowing them not an instant to catch their breath.

“Where… Where should we go…” Ragnar heaved, mostly to himself. “I don’t— I don’t know!”

This time, amidst everything, Deus did not seem to have any comforting words for him.

He could hear the sound of the ground splitting and trees splintering. He could hear not too terribly distant screams, a cacophony of terror— “Help! I need help!”— slowly growing quieter with each rumble of the earth— “Out of the woods! Everybody get out of the woods!” The torch fire, burning fiercely mere instants ago, seemed to almost vanish, and night grew ever darker around them as they ran.

Then, just as abruptly as it had all seemed to have begun, it stopped.

And there was silence. Horrible, sunless silence. Even the quaking of the earth had suddenly ceased.

Ragnar dared to slow his pace to a halt, if only because he did not think he could have run a single second longer. Every muscle in his body burned, even his lungs seemed to ache in his chest. He swallowed hard and looked over his shoulder to make sure it was still Deus that was clutching his hand, his hot breath ragged in his chest all the while. “Did… Did we lose them?” he asked, though he already knew the answer.

The expression on Deus’s face was strange. Calm, but not without fear. Contemplative, but far from curious. The corners of their brows turned upward. Their lip seemed to quiver, but only a little.

“It was something in the ground, Ragnar.” Their voice was hardly a whisper. “It was everywhere.”

Ragnar could not muster a response for a good while. His breath quivered upon his exhale, and he chewed his cheek, his stomach churning in the pit of his being. Finally, he gave Deus’s hand a tug, and he began to pull them after him again, leading them deeper into the woods. “Whatever it was, the townsfolk must have fled from it. Come. We should go as far away from here as we can,” he declared.

Deus nodded in wordless agreement, following close behind him. And then; “You’re hurting me.”

Ragnar paused at that. He glanced at them, and then down at where he grasped Deus’s hand. His grip was tight, too tight, still white in every knuckle. He let go of their hand, and forced the rest of himself to relax a little, while he was at it. “Why didn’t you say anything until now?” he frowned.

Deus shrugged their shoulders. “It didn’t hurt badly until now,” they answered simply.

They then ventured a glance over their own shoulder, their lips parting, brows furrowed somewhat.

“It is as you said,” they added, after a long moment of quiet had passed, turning back to look up at him again. They reached out a hand to touch his arm with. “We should keep walking.”

Ragnar nodded in understanding and reached up to place his hand over Deus’s where it rested on his forearm. “At least until that damned mare finds her way back to us, yes,” he agreed, and with that, he turned and kept on through the trees, slowing his pace only once, to tug the hood of his coat over his head as he walked. Deus followed close behind him, their hand having slipped from his arm.

The fog seemed almost to part for them as they walked. Ragnar’s boots slipped and squelched in all the mud, but Deus seemed largely unbothered by it. Where Ragnar seemed to struggle to even take a step, shivered in the night air, Deus treaded with ease, without so much as a frown upon their face.

There was no noise to be heard, not even the buzzing of insects or the call of nighttime animals.

It was suffocating, awful, and the darkness did little to ease him. “Are you not cold?” Ragnar asked, desperate to fill the void of silence, as he struggled to pry his boot out from the mud.

Deus had been looking over their shoulder, behind themselves, again. They turned their gaze to him at the sound of his voice and, after he had spoken, they cocked their head to one side.

“Of course I am cold,” they responded. “This place is very cold.”

Ragnar could only blink for a moment. “You must tell me these things!” he exclaimed, pulling the cloak from his shoulders as he spoke. “Here, at least put my cloak on. It’ll keep you warmer than your skin will. Besides, we can’t have you romping around as bare as you are from now on, anyhow.”

Deus contemplated this for a moment, then reached out a slender hand and accepted the dark cloak from him. They swaddled themselves in it, and then, drew the dark fabric close to their chest. Once again, they turned to look behind themselves, worrying their lower lip between their teeth.

Ragnar bent to catch their attention again. “Deus,” he prompted, frowning.

Deus turned to look at him. “I think,” they murmured, “we should stray from our current path.”

As if on cue, the sound of thundering hooves accompanied their suggestion. For a happy instant, Ragnar thought perhaps the white mare had finally made her merry way back to them, but when he lifted his face to look, he saw the ghostly silhouette of a horse, black as night, surging from the fog itself, weaving through the trees, at a swift but unperturbed pace. Seated atop its back, Ragnar could only barely see, was a man, armored in metal as pitch as his horse, long cloak flowing loose at his back.

Ragnar felt as if he were seeing a ghost. A Black Knight of the Creed of Gaia.

He cursed under his breath and snatched Deus up into his arms. Holding them close to himself, he hastily ducked out of the knight’s path and leapt over a newly fallen tree trunk, splintered at the trunk and sickly pale in its center. He shoved its thorny branches aside and ducked underneath the cover, pulling Deus to his chest and turning so that his back was pressed to the wood. He held his breath.

The pair hid there for a good while, simply waiting, watching through the leaves, still as possible.

The sound of thudding hooves drew closer, and closer still, until it felt as if they were practically overhead. Then, as suddenly as they approached, they came to a halt. The horse whickered and pawed at the muddy earth with its hoof. There was nothing to be heard besides it, only awful silence.

A pair of armored boots hit the ground. The knight had dismounted.

The knight approached, each clattering step of his boots far closer than the last, and then, he was standing upon the fallen tree trunk. Ragnar’s heart stilled in his chest. He could not have drawn breath if he tried. He could see the pitch shadow of the knight, looming overhead, cape whipping in the wind, just like those black flags. Hunting. Hunting for them? Ragnar did not know. He did not care. 

Slowly, carefully, his hand moving hardly an inch at a time, Ragnar reached for his sword.

Suddenly, Deus curled their fist in the fabric of his shirt. He glanced over at them, and while they did not seem terribly frightened, their eyes were transfixed upon their lap. He followed their gaze.

Upon their knee sat a rat, long and slender, staring up at them with beady black eyes.

Ragnar felt himself tense at the sight, but he did not dare gasp, did not dare move. He could only watch as the rat sat up on its hind legs, could only watch as it scuttled up Deus’s stomach and up onto the curve of their breast. Deus simply held its gaze, chest rising and falling quietly, ineffably steady.

The knight clicked his tongue. The rat lifted its little face at the sound.

The rat leapt up from where it had settled upon their breast, then, up to their shoulder, and then it hurried up Ragnar’s arm, through the branches of the fallen tree, and into the open hand of the Black Knight, who rose to his feet and held it in his palm for a time. The rat squeaked quietly for a moment, and then, sickeningly, there was the sound of crunching bones and a high pitched yelp of a squeak. The knight then cooly tossed the rat back to the earth, having crushed the poor thing in his hand, where it laid, dead.

There came the thudding of footsteps, again, and this time, each footfall was quieter than the last. And then, a moment later, there came the thudding of swift hooves in the mud. Then, silence.

Even after the knight was surely long gone, neither of them dared move for a good while. Finally, Deus relaxed, their form shifting so that it leaned up against him. They exhaled quietly, breath quivering only a little, and they lifted a hand to place over their chest as they look a moment to compose themselves. Ragnar let go of his sword and drew them closer, his lips in their hair, relief washing over him.

Deus reached up to take hold of his arm again. “We should stay here for a while,” they whispered.

Ragnar could only nod in agreement, far from ready to venture from their hiding spot. The whole of his body ached, every muscle burning and tight. Heavens above, he felt himself to be too old for any of this. He settled back against the tree trunk once again, his weary head lolling backwards to rest up against the wood. He felt exhausted already, but he did not think he could sleep if he tried.

Deus leaned against him, their head resting upon his shoulder. They simply stared at up him for a time, contemplating him. Then; “You have done so much for my sake, already. Thank you.” They lifted a hand and, gingerly, they eased his eyes shut. “The hunt is over. Rest, now,” they murmured. “You need it.”

Ragnar began to hear the buzzing of insects and the call of nighttime animals.

“Tomorrow is the time for bravery, and caution. I will protect you through the night.”


	6. Of the Dawn and the Dusk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Semester's over so I finally have time to write! Hopefully I can get back into the groove again soon.

The white mare returned to him just as the dawn broke.

The daylight was pale, nearly bleak where it spilled through the leaves overhead, and all the mist from the day before, it seemed, had broken with the rising sun. The morning birds sang up in their nests, insects chirped and hummed, the river roared in the distance, and yet still it was all too quiet for Ragnar’s taste. He very nearly started when he heard the mare’s approach, half expecting the knight’s massive black stallion from the night before. But when he turned, there she stood, pale and quiet as ever.

He sighed. “Where in all the heavens have you been?” Ragnar demanded.

The white mare simply stared at him for a time, pausing in the shade of a great pine. “You had no need of me, so I did not come,” she replied. “Yet still, I am here, now. Is that not enough?”

Ragnar simply closed his eyes, his frustration abandoning him upon his exhale. He knew he would never, could never understand the things she did, and why she did them when she did, and to cling to such things was a doomed endeavor. Just as doomed as being cross with her was. And so, without another word, he started forward to take her lead up in his hand, and it fit just as well as his gloves did.

“It is more than enough,” he muttered, shooing away the flies that had settled upon her haunches.

The forest felt different than it ever had before, quieter, stiller, as if everything were too frightened to venture from the safety of home and into the daylight. The steadily mounting sense of dread all around him did little to assuage his nervous state. Ragnar placed his hand upon the thick trunk of a nearly barren fruit tree, and he found even it felt wrong, as if it had been chewed and hollowed from the inside out. The hairs on his arm rose like the hackles of a cat. He quickly drew his hand away.

He did not have to ask the mare if she felt it, too. She faltered when Ragnar took her lead, but she hesitated only an instant, offering no protest as he gently tugged her after him.

They should leave, he knew, and soon. Go as far away as they could.

The longer the men of the Creed lurked within the forest, the more twisted and wrong it became.

“Deus…” Ragnar called as he lead the mare back into the pale light of the early morning, the air cold in his lungs as he spoke. He dared only to raise his voice to about a speaking tone, for perhaps fear of catching the attention of something worse than the stillness all around him. “Deus?”

He found them crouched on the side of the path they had taken the night before. The hoof prints the Black Knight’s horse had left were undisturbed, the earth still soft in the morning chill.

Without a word, Ragnar let go of the mare’s lead to shirk his cloak from his shoulders and drape it over Deus’s. They staggered a little under the sudden weight of heavy fur and wool, but when he offered his hand, they took hold of it and let him help them to their feet. They simply looked up at him for a good while, offering him not a word, and then, their eyes wandered again to the horseshoe marks in the earth.

Ragnar’s gaze followed theirs. Even just the sight of the prints served to quicken the beating of his heart, to stir frightening memories from perhaps not so long ago. “He’s gone?” he said. He had intended it more as reassurance, but the words curled involuntarily upwards in inflection towards the end.

Deus nodded, even as ever, not so perturbed as he and his mare. They had not let go of his hand.

They looked back up at him, strands of pale gold drifting into their face. “…I do not know where to go, from here,” they confessed, voice hardly more than a whisper, their lips parted.

Ragnar could not muster an answer for some time. The orphan beast had not been the voice that had called to them, after all, and he himself knew not where to take them, next. He looked about, listened to the feeble singing of the birds for a time, and then, turned to meet Deus’s fair face again.

Gentle as he could, he lifted them up into his arms and sat them upon the back of the white mare.

“For now? Away from here,” was the only reply Ragnar could offer them.

He reached out and he took the mare’s reigns in his hand and he tugged her after him, away from the muddied path and into the cover of the trees, headed off in the direction of the distant river, following its roar as best he could. He trusted the river far more than he did some well traveled road.

“Away from the Creed,” he added. “Away from this forest.”

Deus nodded their head in agreement and reached out to take hold of the saddle with one slender hand, gathering their borrowed winter cloak close against their chest with the other. “I think that would be wise,” they murmured. Their gaze wandered to a sickly tree as they passed, then downwards, settling upon the trampled wild grass and torn up earth. “Do you know what could have done all of this…?”

In truth, Ragnar had dared not even venture a guess.

“I don’t,” he confessed, as he lead his horse carefully over a splintered, fallen pine tree, swatting at the gnats buzzing by his ear as he did. Damned insects! Why were there so many of them? “Forgive me. In truth,” he continued, “I haven’t even a clue how I would begin to go about finding o—”

He felt something roll under his boot, quite suddenly.

He staggered and he swore, having nearly fallen backwards into his ass. He righted himself with a hand on the white mare’s side. The beast huffed a little, as if offended, but she would forgive him. He gave her a gentle clap on the shoulder, to remind her she was a horse, and he turned back to look at Deus, who simply stared back at him, the corners of their brows turned upward in concern.

Ragnar could not help but offer them a ghost of a smile. “I’m alright,” he assured them.

Their expression eased somewhat, and they nodded in understanding, settling back into their seat.

When he turned to look down at his feet again, to see what had tripped him, he found a rounded arm of wood, swaddled in charred fabric. He bent down to pick it up, to study it for a moment, and pitch colored ash fell away from the half burnt wood into his hand. “A torch. It must have belonged to someone from the village,” he mused aloud, setting the torch back down on the ground and rising to his feet. “What could have made them simply abandon it? And during the dead of night, no less…”

“Ragnar,” called Deus then, their gaze fixed upon something in the near distance.

Ragnar looked up at them, then followed their eye, lifting his free hand to shield his face from the bleak morning sunlight, scattered by the fog. He found himself met with the still form of a man, lying face down in the grass, arms splayed out and half swallowed by a twisted holly bush.

A dead man. The humming of insects was a roar in his ears.

“Stay here for a moment,” he urged, and without waiting for a reply, he let go of the mare’s reigns to make his way over to the body. Sickeningly, he was nearly certain he recognized the poor sod’s curly red hair. An old drinking companion, one that surely would have killed him hours ago, dead.

He dropped into a crouch again at the side of the body, and the steadiness of his own hand as he reached out surprised himself. He took the dead man by his shoulder and lifted him up.

It was nearly sickening. Meat chewed away, torn from bones, blood clotted and reeking where it pooled and oozed from his severed veins. Ragnar would never be certain whether this was indeed that old drinking buddy; any distinguishing features had been gnawed from his face. It was nearly as horrible of a sight as that of the men who had been blown apart by the Creed’s thundering cannons.

He could bear to look only for a moment before he simply let the body slump back facedown into the earth. When he stood and looked back towards his companions, his heart thundering in his chest, Deus had dismounted from the white mare. They stared off to their side with a solemn stare.

Ragnar dreaded following their gaze again, but he forced himself to nonetheless.

It looked almost like the aftermath of a most terrible battle. The cold, misty morning woods were scattered with bodies— Bodies splayed in strange positions across the dewy grass, mud streaking their skin; bodies facedown in the bushes; bodies bent at the hip over fallen, chewed apart trees.

It was as though they had been torn to shreds, feasted upon by a hundred rabid beasts all at once.

Ragnar choked back the dread rising in his throat, daring only once more to look upon the corpse at his feet. The Creed, he realized as he began to wander backwards toward his companions, again. The Creed had surely wrought this, some way or another. He could conceive of no other possibility. Whatever this was, it had slithered into the forest from where it had hidden in the Creed’s shadow.

“What black magics have they gotten their hands into?” Ragnar hissed through his teeth.

And it was then that Deus abruptly parted from the white mare’s side, hurrying off into the trees with such purpose that Ragnar’s coat fell from their shoulders and crumbled to the earth.

“Deus,” Ragnar called, frowning. The mounting dread in the pit of his stomach was too great to let them wander too far from him, but they paid him little heed. He gathered his coat up from the ground and forced his legs to follow, swallowing his nerves and swatting away the swarm of flies as best he could.

There was a body, slumped over with its back up against a tree, head hanging.

Deus crouched at its side and gently placed a hand upon the curve of its arm, their focus upon it nearly unwavering. As Ragnar neared, he noticed that this corpse was more heavily armored than the rest, and, furthermore, that he was intimately, unfortunately familiar with the dark metal designs.

“A knight of the creed…?” Ragnar realized aloud, quirking a brow.

Not a Black Knight, not the Black Knight they had seen the night before, but a lay knight, torn to bloody shreds, just as the villagers had been. There was equality only in death, he supposed.

And then, as if to spite him, the knight suddenly inhaled sharply, her breath juddering and shaky, labored with pain. She sputtered and clutched at her side, where her chainmail was stained red and brown with blood, and Ragnar reflexively took a step backward at the sight. And then, realizing now that she was alive, despite all her injuries, he bristled, his hand lifting nearly instinctively to the hilt of his blade. A dead knight of the creed had been a sour enough sight, a living, albeit suffering, one was worse.

Deus hushed her. “It’s alright,” they murmured, reaching out to gently pull the knight’s helmet off from her head. The woman flinched from their touch. “I won’t hurt you,” Deus assured her.

Her face was pale and muddied, her long brown hair, thoroughly tousled from her helm, clutching to her sweating face. One of her heavy lidded eyes was screwed tightly shut, her brows furrowed and teeth gritted amidst her agony. “Wha… Who are you?” she heaved, still clutching to her wound.

“Calm yourself, dear woman. You’re only causing yourself more pain,” was Deus’s only response.

Ragnar reached out a hand to urge Deus back towards his horse with, hovering gentle near their shoulder. “Come away,” he pleaded, but he did not force them. “We don’t know what did this.”

Deus paid him little heed, instead leaning forward to begin undoing the clasps of the knight of the Creed’s breastplate. The knight clutched at their hands and their wrists as they moved, hissing through her clenched teeth, but she seemed too weak to manage a decent enough grasp to impede them. Ragnar could feel himself beginning to seethe. That she dared to touch them… He took a step forward.

“Deus, come away,” he pleaded, more earnestly, now. “She— This is not worth your time.”

“Time?” echoed Deus, sparing him only a glance as they shooed his hand away. “Time is a child’s game, albeit a beautiful one,” they replied, tone nearly bitter amidst their amusement.

With that, and some effort, they carefully lifted the heavy black metal breastplate up and over the knight’s lulling head. Despite all his reservations, Ragnar reflexively reached out a hand and helped them to set it aside in the grass. Deus murmured a quiet word of gratitude before they tugged the knight’s chain mail and padding from her belts and rolled them up so that they could examine her wounds.

It was a frightening sight. Ragnar had seen a great amount of bloodshed in his life, more than he would wish upon anybody else, but there was something about the idea of being gnawed at and burrowed into as this woman surely had been that sickened him enough to turn his face away.

Deus’s voice was calm when he heard them address the knight. “What do you call yourself?”

The knight took a few labored, harsh breaths before she could muster a reply. “Christiana…” she croaked between her groans. She sputtered for a moment, and hissed at the pain it wrought her. “I am Ser Christiana… of the Holy See,” she added, once she had the breath to manage it.

Her strained words only served to bristle Ragnar further.

Through the trees, he could see the pale silhouette of his mare. She met his gaze, held it, and the cold look in her brown eye was a harsh foil to his own sparking anger. He exhaled.

“Christiana,” echoed Deus, lifting a hand. Ragnar heard the Knight suck in a sudden breath, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw Deus reach for a thin pillar of pale light as it bled through the mess of leaves and branches overhead and take it up in their hand. “I will help you, Christiana.”

Ragnar turned back to look, just as the knight pressed herself back against the tree, abruptly more lucid than she had been an instant ago. “You will not use your rituals on me,” she spat.

Deus seemed almost amused at that. “Spell and ritual and prayer, all and none the same, but, very well. If you can muster the strength to stop me,” they remarked, drawing from the light something akin to a small, handleless knife, “then I will consider you capable of your own recovery.”

They then turned the edge of the sliver of light in their hand against the skin of their wrist, and they began to cut up along the white vein underneath. A pinprick of golden light beaded down their arm.

Ragnar felt his heart suddenly go still in his chest at the sight.

It was nearly a reflex. Before he had even thought about what he was doing, Ragnar took Deus’s slender wrist up into one white knuckled hand, and he yanked them backwards. “Don’t!”

Deus made not a sound, simply stared at his hand, shaking about their wrist, and then, up at him.

“Do not bleed for her,” he pleaded, quieter, now, an old and familiar anger broiling in the very pit of his belly. His blood itself roared at him that he had just committed a grievous insult, to so roughly drag a creature such as Deus from their whims, but still, Ragnar did not release them. “She—She would not do the same for you. Just last night she was hunting for us with the rest of them. She and all of her ilk. Do not shrink yourself for her. Do not hurt yourself for someone who refuses to seek truth.” He felt an ache in his throat. “You are worth more than that. You are worth more than her. You will always be.”

Deus’s gaze was unwavering, unfazed. “Let go of me,” they said, voice so calm it was frightening.

Under the weight of their gaze, Ragnar forced his hand to uncoil from where he’d grasped their wrist, so small in to his grasp. Deus did not look away from him, simply held his gaze from where they sat. Golden, glowing blood was smeared across the curl of his palm. He hated the sight of it.

Ragnar took a step backward, his heart thundering like the pounding of a drum.

“Please. I will bandage her wounds if you insist, but do not bleed for her,” he continued, not quite ready to relent, and the tremble in his own voice surprised him. “The Holy See was raised with the intent to crusade, and only to crusade. We had done nothing. We had done nothing but offer them kindness and friendship, and they slaughtered us in our homes. I watched them murder women in their beds, I watched them hunt our children with their dogs through the forests as though they were deer, I watched them take our stone circles for themselves, and I watched them build their cathedrals over the places where my best friends’s blood would not wash free of the dirt. This one is not so young. She would have been a child, but not so young a child. She knows it. The Crusader only ever stopped the slaughter because I…” He choked on his words. “Because Caswallawn… He only stopped, because he was made to stop.”

Christiana scowled from where she rested against the tree. “You know nothing of Alexander! The pontiff was a greater man than the likes of you will ever be,” she spat, still clutching at her wounds, baring her bloodied teeth at him. “We were nothing before him. He was the most h—”

“Be silent, or your wounds will fester along with your words,” Deus chided, sparing her something that was almost a glare over their shoulder. Then, they turned their eyes back upward, to meet his gaze. A smile, faint as the dull morning light, crossed their face. “You’re right,” they said.

The phrase caught Ragnar off guard, shocked him into silence.

Deus merely looked at him for a time. “You’re right,” they said again, a bit softer, more somber.

And with that, they turned back towards the Knight of the Creed, lifted the edge of the light to the skin of their wrist, and they bled themselves into her wound. Their blood gleamed like daybreak, and Ragnar could only watch as it pooled in the woman’s wounds, watch as the woman’s very muscle and skin began to slowly stitch itself back together, watch as the knight’s body healed itself.

Christiana struggled against them for a moment, but not for a very long moment.

She vomited once, spitting bile and blood, and then slumped back against the tree, unconscious.

Deus drew their hand back, and the cut on their arm was so thin and precise, that it had already stopped bleeding. They then rose to their feet, their hands and their knees and their legs still untarnished by the mud and the dirt and the blood. They started off back to his white mare.

“It is done,” they declared.

They left the knight there where she leaned up against the tree, asleep as her wounds healed.

The white mare said nothing as the pair approached, simply turned her head to look ahead again, as she always did. Ragnar lifted Deus carefully up onto her once again, his hands lingering for a moment at their hips before he drew them back. “Forgive me,” he mustered, the quaver in his own voice a surprise to even himself. The words had escaped his lips before he even truly thought them.

Deus did not look at him. It ached like the twist of a knife in his gut. “There is nothing to forgive.”

He could not muster a response. He was certain he would weep, if he tried.

And so, Ragnar pulled the hood of his cloak over his head and took the White Mare’s reins, and he carried on through the woods. He was not sure if source of the ill feeling in his stomach was the smell of the rot all around him, or if it was related to the awful aching in his chest.

***

They made camp on the southernmost edge of the forest, the very moment the sun began to set.

Ragnar had not been beyond this side of the forest in a great many years, yet he found he could muster neither excitement nor anxiety over the prospect. The quiet moments between he and Deus had very suddenly become awkward and tense. He no longer knew whether the cryptic and often somewhat curt way they tended to speak to him was out of dislike, or simply Deus being Deus, and Ragnar’s addled, anxious old mind could not help but ceaselessly worry him over it, it seemed.

He had left them with the White Mare for a few minutes, in part to go and collect more dry wood for the fire before the sun dipped too far beneath the horizon and in part to allow himself a moment away from all that had happened, to allow himself a moment to think and to breath.

It did not help very much. Not at all, really.

He was quick to return, once he had gathered enough wood and dry pine needles to last them the night. It was not so difficult to find his way back, with the distant glow of the already burning beginnings of their campfire stark against the waving afternoon light. Ragnar found Deus precisely where he had left them, seated before the fire with their knees drawn nearly to their naked chest, their body tense in the chill and their eyes settled idly upon the twist and flicker of the flames before them.

They had smiled at him, when they told him that he was right.

They had smiled at him, and Ragnar could not recall whether that smile had reached their eyes.

After all, they had spilled their precious blood, cut their divine skin, all for a Knight of the Creed. A Knight of the Holy See. Any creature’s wonts, whether human, or animal, or divine, or otherwise, were their own, but nonetheless, it ached him that Deus would bleed themselves even a drop for somebody who would have no doubt cut them open and bled them dry, had she possessed the strength. That Deus would bleed themselves, and think it love, or forgiveness, or… He did not know what.

They did not seem to be angry with him. But, Deus was a considerably difficult creature to read.

Well. At the very least, he could see that they were cold.

Ragnar draped his cloak around them again, being cautious not to touch them. He did not want to do anything to further invoke their ire, even as quiet an ire as it seemed to be. He did not want them to hate him any more than they already may. “Here,” he said as he rose back to his feet, one arm still holding onto the wood he’d collected for the fire. “It will only get colder as it gets darker.”

To Ragnar’s relief, Deus did not reject his offering. They drew the cloak closer to themselves, their breath misting in the winter air as they watched the campfire flicker before them. “You should not have to keep giving this to me,” they remarked, not unkindly. “You are probably colder than I.”

Ragnar paused at that, but shrugged his shoulders as he dropped into a crouch to add more wood to the fire. “Well,” he said through a grunt as he lowered himself, “you’re nakeder than I.”

Deus chuckled at that, and the sound was a comfort, but not terribly much so.

In the moments that followed their laugh, horribly and chokingly silent, save for the crackle of the ravenous fire as Ragnar fed it tinder and the occasional movement of his horse, Deus took up a handful of his cloak from where it had come to rest in their lap. As sickeningly quiet as the rest of the world seemed to be, they studied the fabric, eyes wandering the pattern of the worn material.

“What is this made of?” they inquired, although they did not look up from the make of his cloak. 

Ragnar wished desperately that they would look at him. He wished so desperately that they would look at him, even if it was with indifference, that it ached in his throat, but he swallowed it back as best he could. “The mantle is a black wolf’s hide. The rest of it is goat’s wool,” he replied, turning his gaze to the many spots in which holes had been torn in the fabric, or the material had begun to unspool. “It was… It was a gift, from my clan, for slaying the wolf. I have not taken very good care of it.”

“You have done all that you can,” Deus contended, letting the material fall from their hands back into their lap. They reached out a hand, and the fire calmed somewhat in their shadow. “The evening sun has set, finally. It was a long day, wasn’t it?” they said. “You should sleep, Ragnar.”

They still did not look at him when they spoke.

Nonetheless, he slept. He slept, and when he woke again, he regretted it, because Deus was gone.

Ragnar waited, worrying his lower lip between his teeth. He woke nearly upon daybreak, and he did not know exactly how long he waited for them before he finally resigned the last of his hope of their return to the despair in the pit of his being. He dragged himself to his feet, feeling like he may gag upon the lump in his throat if it grew even another inch. His mouth tasted like bile and his lips like iron, but he stamped out the fire and took the white mare’s reins up into one shaking hand.

Gods, he was the most broken man he had ever met.

He was a thousand shattered pieces, all that remained of the blood of the Dawn Bringer. The last of the Eosphorites, scattered broken across the stranger god Gaia’s dirt. The path he’d been made to walk was a simple one, but no flowers grew around it, and that was nobody’s fault but his own.

He tugged on the White Mare’s reins, ready to resign himself to a paved road. She did not budge.

He tugged again, this time accompanying it with a click of his tongue to get her to walk with him. Even still, she did not move so much as an inch, did not even lean. She regarded him cooly, nearly aloofly, as she always had, and he was not sure if he felt that to be a comfort or an insult.

Ragnar stared at her. He felt the weariest, the oldest he ever had. “Will they come back?” he said.

The white mare said nothing. He tugged again, and again, she did not move.

Ragnar chewed his cheek, frustrated. He dropped the mare’s reins and he rounded on her, nausea churning his stomach, the corners of his eyes stinging. “Fine. Fine! You come to me, when I need you,” he choked out, “and you take me to where I need to go. Where is it that I need to go, now?”

The horse met his stare with steady eyes, brown as his own. “You are a very stupid man,” she said.

Ragnar nearly laughed at that, bitterly, achingly. “Okay, okay. No need for all that,” he grumbled, as he slung his saddlebag over his shoulder and he turned to start off in the direction of the nearest town. He had not been there in a great many years. He recalled liking the taste of their mead, when Caswallawn had allowed him a drink or two. Ragnar paused at the edge of camp, however, when yet still, the mare did not follow him. “Will you ask where I am going?” he inquired over his shoulder.

“No,” said the horse. She lowered her head to taste the grass at her feet. “Go wherever you will, if that is what pleases you,” she added, her voice unruffled, “but you cannot ask me to follow a stupid man. I will come to you, when you need me. And then I will take you to where you need to go.”

Ragnar swallowed the ache this dealt him, along with all the rest, eyes falling to stare down at his boots. “For once in your life,” he sighed, “can’t you say something other than that?”

“I could try,” said the white mare, “but I can only ever speak in a way that you will understand.”


	7. With Hands Interlocked

The Knight Christiana awoke to the sound of thundering hooves.

She did not know how long she had been asleep for. She found herself surprised that she was even alive. She had half expected to open her eyes and be met with the face of Gaia, Himself. When she forced her weary eyes to flutter open, however, there was the world as she had always known it.

Before her, atop his massive horse, well befitting his massive form, was Ser Gadreel. His lips curled into a grin, somewhere between relief and a sneer, as she lifted her face to look at him.

“You look like shit,” he remarked, crass and brutish as he always had been.

Ser Christiana sighed. Part of her was happy to see his face, again. She had been worried that she never would, not two nights ago. Most of her, however, found Gadreel to be the most annoying thing in all the world. “I’m alive, by the grace of Gaia. That’s good enough for me,” she replied, dragging herself into a more upright position. Her neck felt stiff, the muscles in her back tight and knotted.

Gadreel chuckled from his place atop his palomino steed, leaning back in his saddle to get a better look at her as she stood. “Sporting a couple fresh scars, eh? It’s a good look on you.”

“Fuck off,” Christiana grumbled, bracing all of her weight against the bloodied tree at her back.

Gadreel laughed at that, much to her irritation. She had missed him very much.

But, scars? Surely she had not healed of all her wounds in a mere two days. Ser Christiana lifted a hand to tuck under her chain mail and touch her stomach with, and found that, though she ached terribly, the wounds that had been burrowed into her gut had indeed patched themselves up.

It was real, she realized. That pagan man, and that strange creature, who took a woman’s form…

Her first instinct was to confess to Gadreel all that had happened to her. It was then, however, that she recalled the nature of her miraculous recovery, and she choked on her words. Gaia worked in strange ways. He had brought to her, in her time of greatest need, something that cared nothing for Him, and yet, something that could save her. It had not been her time. That was certain. To throw her life away so soon after He had returned it to her would be sinful, or, at the very least, ungrateful.

Ser Gadreel was too brutish to understand that her miraculous recovery was impossible, and Lord Nicholas too callous to truly care. So long as she did not dare to speak of it.

Gadreel dropped down from his horse, then, and Ser Christiana lifted her face as he made his way over to her. He was a hulking, broad beast of a man, his hair blonde and cropped close to his head, helmet clattering against his armor where he’d hooked it against his belt (Gaia beneath, she had surely told him to stop doing that years ago, now). And yet, when he reached out one massive hand to help her onto her feet with, she could not help but find relief in his stalwart arms. Even if he did jostle her aching body a bit too harshly for her comfort as he hugged her. He’d never quite known his own strength.

“Why are you still here, Gadreel?” she asked, for once allowing him to carry her. She was far too weary to complain. “We found the pagan temple. That was what we came here for, was it not…? I’d have thought that Nicholas would be eager to return to the Papal Palace, with the news.”

“Wanted to look for you. Your men said they’d lost you, couldn’t find you for days. If you’d ended dead, I at least wanted to know it for sure. Besides,” Ser Gadreel explained as he lifted Christiana up and sat her upon the back of his strapping draft palomino, the only sort of horse that could muster carrying a man of his ungainly size, “the Lord Nicholas wants to stay for a while longer, at least while the troops pull that big old stone hand out of the river. Said he’d heard of something more interesting.”

That did not make much sense, thought Christiana. But she supposed the Lord Nicholas’s whims had never really made much sense. “I see,” she said, raggedly. Her throat felt very dry.

At this, Gadreel simply made a sound of acknowledgement deep in his throat, and he handed her his horse’s reins.“Go and find the rest of your soldiers, Christiana. Last I heard, they were still holed up by those woods you and the Lord found that old crone’s circus in,” he instructed, taking a few steps backward as he spoke. “The Lord called our men to rejoin the main force at the infidels’s temple.”

Ser Christiana’s hands ached and shook as she took ahold of the reins, but she took ahold of them all the same. “What of yourself, Gadreel?” she inquired. “Where are your men?”

“My men? My men are in Wolverhamp, that little piss drunk town over nearby the southern edge of the forest,” he replied, placing either of his massive hands on his hips. “I’m off to collect them and haul off to where we need to be, same as you with yours. Hardly a day’s walk away, so don’t go worrying over it or anything, alright? Take my horse. You need it more than I. I’ll see you again soon.”

“And what of my breastplate, there?”

“That’s what that bloodied thing there is? Leave it. We’ll get you a fresh one.”

“So be it,” Christiana replied, spurring the big draft into a steady trot. Every heavy-footed step of the horse served only to make her ache worsen, but it was far preferable than walking herself. She glanced down at Gadreel as she passed him. “It… It was good to see your face, again, brother.”

Ser Gadreel quirked a brow at that. “What, are you going mad?” he quipped. “No time for you to be losing your head, now. Get out of here, and you might make it to town by nightfall.”

“Very well.” She could not help but smile at that, even if it hurt her aching muscles to do so. “I will see you soon.”

***

Ragnar had taken the piercings in his face out well before he had found his way into the tavern.

He had never much cared to have familiar people asking about them, much less to have strangers asking about them. He didn’t much feel like talking to anybody at all, right then, to be wholly candid, and besides, he didn’t much feel like he deserved to be wearing those piercings, anyhow.

When he asked for food, the tavern maid brought him a plate with flat bread and a few sausages.

He must have looked even more miserable than he had assumed, because she brought him a big flagon of mead early into his meal, before he had even asked for it. He took a long swig from it as soon as it hit the table, and it did not taste as good as he recalled. Nostalgia must have embellished the flavor in his head, he supposed. Or perhaps he’d just had a poor sense of taste as a whelp.

“Well, you cleaned your plate quickly, didn’t you,” the tavern maid commented when she came to collect his empty plate and cup. “Something else to eat, while you’re here?”

He shook his head no. “Another drink, when you have the time,” he replied. “I want to be drunk.”

Ragnar was a big man, with a strong stomach. It took a lot of mead, and a lot of coin, to even get him tipsy, and he was well past tipsy by the time night fell. He had the money for it, thankfully, and even if he did drink himself dry, he could always go to that crone Mama Farfalee out in the woods for an odd job. She always seemed to have coin enough to— Oh. Oh, no. He supposed he couldn’t.

Heavens above, he could hardly think straight. He could hardly sit straight. Was he that drunk?

Drunk enough, at least, not to notice how crowded the tavern had suddenly gotten. People were singing, weren’t they? Singing loudly, so loudly. And badly, at that. Ragnar lifted his lulling head, irritated.

Where had all these people come from? Were they wearing armor? They were, weren’t they? He could barely see, the world had become so blurry, but he could tell. Why in all the heavens would a bunch of drunken village men be wearing such well made and dark colored armor?

Oh, realized Ragnar. Oh, groaned Ragnar, running a hand back through his hair.

Soldiers of the Holy See. Ragnar sighed and sank back into the shadows best he could. He didn’t want any trouble, but heavens, did he hate the Creed. They just had to piss on every town in the world and claim it for themselves, didn’t they? Couldn’t he just have a drink and sulk in peace?

The tavern maid stopped by his table again, with a pitcher of mead in one hand and balancing an impressive plate of what looked to be roast duck in the other. She filled his cup.

“Thank you,” Ragnar managed, before she hurried off again, accepting the fresh drink as politely he could manage, drunk as he was. No doubt she was frazzled by all the commotion.

“Of course, sir,” she responded, before she turned and went off to find the ones who had ordered the roast. Ragnar could not help but watch over his shoulder, worried despite himself for her sake, as she waded through the bustling crowd, struggling to hold the plate steady. More than once she nearly dropped the roast onto the floor, but it wasn’t until a sallow man, half donned in black armor and his face red from drink, grabbed her by the wrist, that the plate fell toppling to the ground with a clatter.

Ragnar sighed. It was about what he had been expecting to happen eventually.

“Look at this, boys! A cute little tavern girl. What are you doing, working so late?” he said, pulling her into his lap. The woman flushed and moved to rise to her feet, but he grabbed her about her waist and held her tight. “I’ll have to take you with me. I’ve been missing my girls back home, after all.”

Ragnar lifted his drink to his mouth for one last swig, but found it empty.

He sighed again, and he dragged himself up from his table to his feet. Oh. Oh, heavens above, he was dizzy. He placed a hand on the table to steady himself. He needed a moment.

“Don’t touch me, you drunk bastard. Let go,” the woman spat, wrenching about in his lap. When the soldier merely laughed, she twisted and she struck him squarely between the eyes with the point of her elbow. “I said, let go of me, now!” she snapped, pulling her way free from him.

The soldier cried out and released her, clapping his hands over his face, and everything fell silent.

The woman rose to her feet and stormed off to go and take cover in the kitchen, shaking in every limb from rage. The soldier she’d elbowed scowled and rose to his feet, waving for his compatriots to come with him. The Creed soldiers, tipsy as they were, followed behind him to pursue her.

They did not get far. Ragnar barred their path.

He simply stood there for a time, looming like a great bear over their heads. He said nothing, in part because he did not much want to talk and in part because he thought he may throw up if he opened his mouth. Nonetheless, the men balked in his shadow, exchanging uncertain glances between themselves. For an instant, it seemed as if they would abandon their cause and go about their nights. There were not many men, even among the Creed dogs, who lacked enough sense to yap at a man Ragnar’s size, after all.

The man at the head of the beast, however, was, it seemed, tipsy enough to want to prove himself an exception to the rule. He sauntered up to Ragnar as if he knew no fear, planting his hands on either of his hips, and looked him up and down, studying Ragnar like he was some exotic beast.

“You’re in my way,” he declared.

Ragnar turned his dark gaze briefly over his shoulder and towards the door to the kitchen, where the woman from before lingered in the doorway. She gave him a nod of her head. And so, Ragnar turned his gaze back to the Creed soldiers, and he snarled from deep in his chest, “Sit down.”

The soldier scoffed at that. “Do you have any idea who I am?” he sneered, rounding on Ragnar.

“No,” Ragnar grumbled. He had to take a moment to decide which of the three soldiers that had just approached him he should be focusing on. The one in the middle, he supposed.

“I am Captain Alden Santillian, right hand to the Knight Commander, Ser Gadreel.”

Even shifting and splitting as the image of him was, Ragnar could tell he barely even reached his chest. Perhaps he was simply even stupider than usual when he was drunk, but Ragnar felt like punching a few short men in their little faces. “You’re a Creed dog who’s taken to pissing on trees that don’t belong to you,” he grumbled. Like the snarl of an animal, his lips curled back from his teeth. “That’s who you are.”

The captain paid that little heed. “Ah, that’s it!” He snapped his fingers and turned to address his men. “That’s it. Do you all know who I think this one looks like? It’s uncanny, really.”

He received no response, and yet he continued nonetheless.

“The late Eosphoros! Gods, it’s been years. What was the old man’s name— Ah, Caswallawn!” he declared, and Ragnar stiffened where he stood. “Your face doesn’t look much like his did, actually, more in… How you carry yourself. As if you could speak with the trees and they’d hug you for the pleasure of your company. Gaia beneath, I heard a lot about that man. Good man, they told me. As far as infidels go, anyways. Ah, but when I saw him all those years ago, dead on the battlefield with those pretty brown eyes gone all cold and glassy, I knew anybody could die. Quite the eye opener, as it were.”

Ragnar did not respond for a moment, seething. “I will take that as a compliment,” he said finally.

The captain scoffed and sneered again. “You should take it as a warning,” he corrected, tapping the hilt of his blade. “I take it you don’t want to end up like him, now, do you?”

“That depends. Do you?” slurred Ragnar, towering over him. He was tired and he was angry and he was drunk, and was beginning to think that perhaps there was no better way of blowing off steam than throwing this little stupid man around a bit. He could do it. It would be easy.

The smile faded from the captain’s face. “Listen, now,” he said, stepping forward. Whether he was drunk or overconfident or just stupid, Ragnar had no idea. “I know your type. I understand, truly. You are big, yes, and you are strong, but truth is, you wouldn't hurt a fly. So, why don't you just turn around and go on your merry way, now. That way, nobody has to get hurt. Nobody has to die.”

Ragnar threw him out a window.

All it took was a brief grapple for the front of his shirt, and then Ragnar flung him. He had not, however, intended to send him through, or even truly been aiming for the gap in the wall, but with hardly more than a grunt from Ragnar, the captain went flying through the air, and toppling through the sill, and out into the alley. For another moment, there was only silence, laden with shock.

And then, Ragnar turned and he braced his weight against the wall, and he threw up in a corner.

And then, while he sputtered and gagged, spitting the remaining bile from his mouth, Ragnar was punched in the face. He didn’t quite see who threw it, but it wasn’t difficult to figure that it was one of the handful of Creed soldiers rounding on him. It disoriented him, and badly so, but he somehow managed to not go crashing to the ground, perhaps because he had a wall to crash up against instead.

Ragnar groaned and lifted his face, dragging himself back up to his full height.

And what a height it was. The blurred images of the Creed soldiers seemed to balk in the wake of him as he stood. Even drunk as he was, Ragnar knew full well just how very big he was.

“Is that how you want it?” he slurred. Three soldiers. No, five. No, two. No, six. What? He tasted iron on his tongue, and a hole in the back of his mouth where he was quite certain one of his molars had been a moment ago. He spat blood to the side, and snarled, “Come on. Don’t be shy.”

To be perfectly candid, he thought he did remarkably well, for a man hammered beyond belief.

Well enough, at least, to stumble his way out of the tavern into the night on more or less his own terms, having been ordered out by the tavern owner. Ragnar came out of the scuffle bruised all over and still spitting and dribbling red down his face, but he left behind a handful of Creed solders far more worse for wear than he was. That was good enough for him. Little men. The lot of them.

“Bastards,” he slurred, spitting blood and wiping it away on the sleeve of his coat. “Creed dogs!”

He threw up again some distance away from the tavern, and the force of the retch staggered him so badly that he nearly fell. He took a moment to steady himself before he started off again, but the world was spinning so violently that each step he took felt more clumsy and treacherous than the last. He did not get much farther before his legs became tangled, and he fell flat on his face in the mud.

For a moment, he did not bother to try and stand, he was so dizzy.

When he lifted his face, he was met with the sight of somebody standing directly in front of him. Two pale, bare feet in the mud. Gods, he hoped he hadn’t crashed into them when he’d tripped. He didn’t think he had, but he was so large and so drunk that he simply may not have noticed. Nonetheless, he was in their way, wasn’t he? Ragnar groaned and began to pull himself together.

“Sorry. Sorry,” grumbled Ragnar, reaching up to take ahold of a nearby wood post to try and fail to drag himself up with. Bare feet. What sort of person in their right mind would go around walking in all this mud and dirt completely barefoot? He lifted his face to look and see.

And there Deus stood.

There Deus stood, with his white mare at their back, their arms crossed over their chest and a sad look in their pretty eyes. They had clothed themselves, he realized, albeit sparsely so. They were wearing a dress, made from what seemed to be knitted, soft white yarn, that reached about halfway down his legs. It had sleeves, loose and slit up their arms, but left their fair shoulders bare and much of their back and their chest open. They had used the leftover yarn, it seemed, to cinch the dress at the waist.

“I left,” they said, rather flatly, but not unkindly, “to make myself a dress from goat’s wool yarn.”

Despite himself, Ragnar could not help but laugh at the bitterness of the situation.

He let himself slump back down into the mud, bloodied and drunk and pathetic, and chuckling. When he lifted his face again, Deus had dropped into a crouch in front of him, their hands resting folded in their lap. “I’m in trouble, aren’t I?” he chuckled, still smiling, despite everything.

Deus said nothing for a time. They looked terribly sad. It was enough to rip the grin from his face.

“…The Holy See will know where you are, soon, now. I think it would be wise to take our leave of this place as soon as possible,” they remarked after a moment. They tilted their head to one side, beautiful golden hair tumbling down one of their still bare shoulders as they did. “Can you stand?”

He stood. He garnered all his wit and all his strength, and he stood, because Deus asked it of him.

Deus took his hand up in their own, and, white mare in tow, they lead him away from the tavern, away from the town. Their hand was small and warm in his grasp, the one solid thing in all the world. He held tightly to it, fearing it may vanish from his grasp again at any moment.

***

Caswallawn had told him once, a very, very long time ago, now, that the wolves howled so that the moon would hear them. Sung because they loved the moon, sung for a love they could never hope to truly reach, in the absence of the sun. Creatures bound to the earth, clinging to pinpricks of light in a night sky.

Ragnar had begun to feel very much like a wolf.

He felt sicker than he did drunk, now. Lying there on his back, tormented by nausea churning in the pit of his stomach and all the aches and pains from his scuffle that had begun to set in, Ragnar stared wordlessly up at the night sky through the trees. The stars above his head twinkled just as prettily as those upon the cheeks of Deus’s face. The moon was all well and good, but he had always loved those little suns.

“Here, now.” Deus broke the silence, then, as they drew a soaked cloth from the water pot, boiling over their campfire. They wrung it out and took a seat at his side. “Your hand,” they prompted, and when he complied and lifted it, they placed the sodden fabric against his busted knuckles.

It stung, and badly so. Ragnar sucked in a breath through his teeth.

He opened his mouth to complain, nearly, but a weary look and a quirked brow from Deus was more than enough to make the words wither on his tongue. He closed his mouth, and he did his best to lie still and not to make a fuss, not to speak, as they went about cleaning the blood and dirt from his wounds.

“Why did you disappear?” he asked, as they drew back from wiping his busted lip of dried blood and bile. And then, when they simply tilted their head; “You all but vanished, when I woke.”

Deus glanced briefly down at their new garment and took a moment to adjust it from the way it had settled in their lap before they continued. They then held his gaze, even and tempered. “I could ask of you the same thing,” they returned. “I left just before the sun rose to spin the daybreak into thread, so that I may have something to trade for the yarn. When I had gotten it, it was midday, and you were gone, but your horse was not. I waited for you, but you did not return,” they explained, and each word carved a deeper embarrassment into his chest than the last. “Why did you disappear?”

“You left without saying a word. I thought you had come to hate me. I thought you felt me cruel, after that Creed woman,” he replied. He was not certain if the aching in his voice came from his battered form or the poor semblance of a heart. “I thought you had left me.”

Deus softened a little at this. “Ah. I see.” They reached out with their free hand and they drew his dark hair, tangled with sweat and blood, back from his face. “You should not have worried so, Ragnar. It is my wish to leave people better than I have found them. I want to look after the lost, hug the wounded, kiss the destroyed. Love the lonely. I would not have left you worse than I had found you,” they explained, and the sweetness in their face was as ever. “But you did not know that. I did not tell you.”

At this, a ghost of a smile found its way onto Ragnar’s face. He shook his head.

“You had no need to tell me, so you did not,” he replied. The churning in his stomach had settled, the ache in his form lessened. “You have told me, now. That is more than enough.”

Deus considered this for a moment. “And… I will continue to tell you these things, from now on.”

They were beautiful, unquestionably so. Even as they drew their hand back from him, let it settle on the curve of their knee, they were beautiful. Beautiful like the daylight against dewy pine needles, stars smeared across their face, warm and hazy and golden. Despite all the mud and the dirt and the miry state of the winter forest around them, even their new dress remained a pure, untarnished white. He quite liked that dress, now that he was looking at it. Some quiet part of him wondered, however, what they may have looked like, had he been able to offer them Eosphorite furs and paints and jewelry to adorn themselves in.

“You did well,” he remarked. And then; “On your dress. It suits you well.”

Deus smiled at him. It was a relief to see. “You are still quite drunk, aren’t you?” they remarked.

“I am drunk,” Ragnar admitted. He did not want to lie to them. “You’re beautiful.”

Deus laughed a little at this and gave a shake of their head, turning their attention back to tending to the fire. Ragnar shifted where he lied, then, and he reached out a big, calloused hand. Even as heavy as his limbs felt and as the world spun around him, it was not so terribly difficult for him to reach his hand to their leg and hold it just over the skin of their leg, curled beneath them.

“Can I touch you?” he asked, and the words burned his throat. He did not know why.

Deus simply looked at him for a time, head tilting a bit, as if puzzled. Then, quietly, they nodded.

Ragnar let the back of his hand settle against their skin, curve of his knuckles meeting the curve of their thigh. He was not usually one to take an easy way out. He chided himself. He hated that they had seen him this way, drunk and beaten upon and pathetic, but at the time, blacking out from hangover had seemed to him more preferable to trying and failing to forget, forever, what it had been like to touch them.

“Forgive me,” he forced through a tight throat.

The look on their face, when they had seen him… He would never risk seeing it again.

He felt warm, and his eyes stung. He would never do such a thing again. Not if there was even a sliver of a chance they would hear of it, not if it would upset them.

“Forgive me,” he said again, nearly a whimper, “even if I do not deserve it…”

At this, Deus hushed him, reaching down to take up his hand in their own. Their skin was soft and warm and unblemished against his, their hand tiny in his calloused grasp. “Be silent. You are cruel to yourself. I was not angry with you, Ragnar, truly. You were right,” they murmured, tracing circles around one of his blistered knuckles. They were steady, the steadiest thing in all the world. “You are but a mortal man. I have all the time in the cosmos to waste, but you only have ninety years. What brief time you have is too valuable to be wasted upon people that cannot accept who and what you are.”

Ragnar stared up at them for a time, perhaps too long of a time.

“For a long time, now,” he mustered, finally. “I have felt as if I am growing downwards, back into the earth, from where I began. That is not our way. That is not my way,” he said. A Eosphorite reached to the heavens. A Eosphorite became as like the stars as he could, each one part of a greater whole, a light in the darkness, and a Eosphorite respected the earth the heavens had offered them to stand upon.“I am not proud of who and what I am, now…” He was the last star in all the sky.

But he was not a star. If anybody could be a star, it was an ebrenn. No. No, if anybody could be a star, it was them. “And what is that?” they asked, tilting their head a little.

Heavens above, they were beautiful. He could not stop noticing it.

Ragnar could not think straight enough to offer them a good answer. “I do not know. I don’t even know where to begin,” he sighed, drawing his hand back from them and rolling over on his side so that he may lug himself up to one elbow and look them in the eye. Deus held his gaze. Even blurry as they were, they were a beautiful, beautiful creature. “I know at least that I am a man. A man,” he said, voice shaking, all rational thought far from his drunken grasp, “who is terribly, terribly fond of you.”

He was dark and he was horrible and frightening, but he would find enough light to adore them.

“You are too kind to me. Too kind. I promise you,” he continued, forcing himself to look them in the eye, even as his head lulled, “I will try harder to be better. For you. I swear it. I swear.”

Deus blinked at him, for an instant surprised. And then, they laughed, soft as a bell, and they gave another slight shake of their head, before they lifted their face and met his eye. The grin on their pretty lip was nearly coy. “Oh, my Ragnar. Come here. Come to me,” they murmured, “if you can make it this far.”

Ragnar did not, as it were, make it that far.

In fact, he collapsed nearly the instant they’d finished their sentence, too drunk and too exhausted to stay awake for even a single second longer. The smile did not fade from Deus’s face at the sight. Rather, they reached out and they pulled his cloak over him as if it were a blanket, cautious with their movements, despite the fact that they were sure Ragnar would not so much as stir even he were shaken.

“He has the intention of cleaning himself up,” they said, glancing over their shoulder at the white mare, who grazed on clover not so far away, “but he is nonetheless a mess, isn’t he?”

The horse simply tossed her head and shook her white mane.


	8. Ser Gadreel, Wall Of Gaia

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I actually wrote this awhile back and forgot to upload it here! I've got a lot of time on my hands now that I'm quarantined, so I'm hoping to write more once I've settled into my online schoolwork. I'm about 2/3rd of the way through chapter 9 right now. Until then, please enjoy!

Ragnar had dreams of a familiar forest, foggy, branches crowning thick and pine needles hunter green all around him. It had been a long time since he’d had one of these dreams. He could nearly smell the soft earth beneath his feet, could nearly feel the moss on the rocks, could nearly hear the voices of his people, voices he thought he’d forgotten. He felt none of his usual loneliness.

He could not help but notice how bright the stars were, over his head.

When Ragnar woke upon that morning, he woke up with a headache and frost beneath his eyes.

It seemed the sunrise had brought the winds of winter with it. The forest air, already chilly before, had become nearly biting, gnawing at his bones even through all his thick clothing and hair. The sky was gray and overcast, and dark clouds seemed brewing in the near distance. It was still not quite cold enough to bring snow, but Ragnar could sense that the first flurries would soon arrive.

He dragged himself up into an upright position, groaning softly and bracing all his weight on one elbow so he may lift his other hand to his face and rub his temples. Heavens above, how much had he had to drink, last night? He was lucky he was only suffering from a headache. Even still, he did not often drink so much as to suffer from headaches. He wasn’t much used to the feeling, and he didn’t much enjoy it. He nearly lied down again, ready to pull his cloak over his head and sleep away the day.

“Good morning.”

The sound of their voice almost startled him. Ragnar pulled his hand away from his face and took a moment to blink at them, to let the realization that last night had not merely been a drunken dream sink in. He did not know why he bothered. They were a dream he did not want to wake up from.

“Cold morning,” he quipped finally, stretching his arms over his head as he spoke. The muscles in his back and arms felt stiff and achy, and it felt nice to roll his shoulders out.

They seemed to laugh at that. “It is,” they agreed. “But it’s nothing you aren’t used to, I imagine.”

Ragnar pulled himself up to his feet, took a moment to wait for the sudden pounding in his head to fade, and ran a his hand back through his hair. “I cannot think of a man alive who could truly get used to the cold,” Ragnar contended, “not even among those of us who were born into it.”

Deus quirked a grin from where they crouched before the smoldering bonfire, arms folded in their lap. Their eyes then wandered to the dark clouds churning just over the horizon. The smile upon their lip, however faint, faded at the sight of it. “Do you think it will storm?” they inquired. They sounded as if the very thought of it made them weary. “It looks like rain, over that way.”

Ragnar followed their gaze and made a sound of contemplation in his chest as he pulled himself to his feet. “Mm. Looks like rain, indeed,” he agreed, running a hand back through his hair. “Heavy, too. I’d wager we can expect a storm about dusk. We’ll have to get a room in an inn tonight.”

They said nothing for a time. “Oh,” they mustered finally.

At this, Ragnar, of whom had begun to slip on his coat and check his pockets to make certain he still had his piercings, glanced at them. He had heard their usual playful tone, had heard disappointment and anxiety in their voice, but he did not quite think he had ever heard Deus sound dispirited before. “Is everything alright?” he frowned, dropping to one knee at their side. He towered over them even like this, but at least he could look them in the face, this way.

Deus met his eye and offered him another faint smile. “Yes. I am not terribly fond of rain. That is all,” they said. Then; “Would you like me to replace those old bandages for you?”

Ragnar paused, caught off guard by that. His eyes wandered briefly to the old, worn bandages he had wrapped his forearms in, and then back at Deus. “…No, not right now. Thank you,” he replied, rising to his feet once again. “We should head northwest, toward the river. If we cross it, there should be another town just beyond it, at the edge of the forest. We can stop to wash up, and we should arrive in town just as that rain hits us. Provided everything goes well, that is. What do you say?”

Deus nodded in understanding and set to smothering the dying throes of their fire with handfuls of dirt. “Only you need to wash up,” they said, voice returning now to its usual playful tone.

Ragnar laughed at that. “Allow me a little luxury, won’t you?” he returned, taking the mare’s reins up into his hand as he spoke. “You and the horse can remain on the path, then. I will try to be quick, but I imagine you both have a great many complaints about me to air out,” he quipped.

“She far more so than I,” Deus contended. “Although, she isn’t the most skilled conversationalist.”

He could not help but allow himself a ghost of a grin. At least somebody agreed with him on that.

***

Ragnar left the white mare, with Deus waiting upon her back, among the thick winter foliage and the pine trees, and he made his way to the river, as he had said he would.

The river ran harsh and rapid around this part of the forest, but he knew it just as well as he knew the forest itself, knew it all as intimately he knew the sword at his back. There was a place where the river opened up wide and was quite shallow, only ankle deep in most spots, before it tapered off and into a fair drop of a waterfall and slowly built to its usual speed and depth again. The water still moved very quickly, here. He could see it as he made his way over, but it was so shallow that he needn’t even take his boots off as he dropped to a crouch in the water and began to clean himself up best he could.

It was a relief to finally wash the last of the dried mud and blood, the only solid remnants of his admittedly hazy drunken scuffle from the night before, from his hands and his face, and yet even more so to clean all his piercings and put them back in his face, where they belonged.

The water was cold, cold enough to make his fingertips a little numb, but he would be lying if he said it had not felt nice to splash some on his face, even despite how chilly it had become, that day. He was lucky to only be suffering from a mere headache. His hangover could have been much worse.

Ragnar inhaled deeply, breathing in cold air, and his breath misted upon his exhale.

In his reflection, he could still see indications of where his face paint had been, mere days ago. At this point, it was little more than a faint shadow on his nose and his lip and under his eyes. It felt very odd, to see himself without it. He checked the pocket of his coat, and he found the vial of thick, black paint he kept tucked safely away inside. He had nearly run out. He would have to find the materials to make more, he supposed. And yet, he knew there was no rush. He would not dare to risk drawing any more unwanted attention to himself, not when the Creed prowled so close by, not with Deus at his side.

“Morning, stranger!” called a voice, then, low pitched and strident. “How met!”

Torn from his thoughts, Ragnar reflexively tucked the paint away into his pocket again, where it would remain safe and hidden. He lifted his face to see a yellow haired man of odd disposition, standing with one boot in the river and one boot still settled in the thick winter foliage standing upon the riverbank across the shallow waters from him. The man was armored, curiously, and heavily so. He seemed terribly tall, even standing so far away as he was. Ragnar thought that he might have seen the worn hilt of a sword peering out from one of the man’s wide shoulders, but he could not be certain.

Ragnar began to rise to his feet. “Well enough,” he responded, just loudly enough to be heard and just amicably enough to mask his wariness, or so he hoped. “And yourself?”

“Myself?” The man stepped down so that both of his boots were in the river. “About the same, I’d say,” he mused aloud as he walked, his approach an unworried lumber. There was a helm tied to his waist, and it clattered against his armor as he went. He was indeed carrying a sword. “The same.”

Ragnar did not think that he had ever in his life met anybody that made him feel small.

He was a beast of a man, and he knew it full well. He stood taller and broader than most anybody who happened into his path. Even back when he was but a mere whelp of a boy, with a silly squeak to his voice and nary a hair on his chin, he had been as tall and as strong as a bull. Now that he was all man, he was big, and he was broad, and he was strong, like the trunk of a great oak or the plodding form of a bear.

And yet, this knight stood nearly a full head and a half taller than he did.

He lumbered towards him across the riverbank, clad all in bronze armor, a sneer on his lip, a huge broadsword that rivaled Ragnar’s own at his back. And Ragnar felt small in his shadow.

“Gadreel— Wall of Gaia. Knight of the Holy See. You happen to be the one that hurled my right hand out a tavern window?” the man said, cocking his sheared head to one side as he spoke, a sneer on his lip. “Good on you. Been looking for an excuse to cut the man’s tongue out for years.”

Ragnar swallowed hard, still caught off guard by the sheer size of the man before him. “You will have to forgive me. That could not have been me,” he managed finally, feebly, without any real conviction behind the words. Heavens above, was this the way people felt when they saw him?

The sneer widened. Ragnar could not help but bristle. “How many other hulking Eosphorites are there in these woods, eh?” Gadreel returned, eyes never once breaking Ragnar’s gaze.

The phrase was enough, at least, to shock some sense into Ragnar.

He took a step backwards, one hand instinctively drifting upward, to the hilt of the broadsword at his back. He could feel his knuckles go white as he took hold of it. “I am in no want of trouble,” he said. It was more a warning than anything else, a growl from deep in his chest as he steeled himself.

The knight took a step forward in turn, unperturbed, far from it. He looked as if he was positively itching for Ragnar to draw his sword, to dare to raise it against him.

“Was that your campground I found, back towards Wolverhamp?” the knight inquired. He walked like a mountain cat stalked, rounding on Ragnar as if he were prey. “Must be traveling real light. Not even a spot cleared for a tent to sleep under. Lucky that storm won’t be hitting us till later today, eh?” A massive hand drifted to his greatsword. “Mind if I ask why there were two spaces for bedrolls?”

Ragnar felt goose skin dash up his arm, felt the hair on the back of his neck bristle. He said nothing.

And at his silence, Gadreel simply chuckled, lifting one massive gloved hand to take hold of his own blade, though he did not draw it. “Ah, I see. So that’s how it is,” he said, nearly jeeringly. “Must be a pretty little wife you’ve got yourself. Where’d she wander off to, I wonder? Can’t be far, eh?”

Ragnar's mind wandered briefly, reflexively, to Deus. They were nearby, still, surely. He would have to deal with this, somehow, and quickly so. He hadn’t the choice, anymore. Ragnar would not let this man touch them. He would not let him so much as look upon them, if he could help it. He was not afraid. The Creed would not have them, would never have them, not without first cutting him down.

Still tightly clutching the hilt of his blade, Ragnar stepped backward again, took a few more steps to the side, to put some distance between himself and the knight. This time, Gadreel let him, cold eyes never once breaking his gaze, even as Ragnar reached back and drew his rounded shield.

He would tear down the Wall of Gaia, if that’s what it took.

Gadreel took the first swing, ripping a bastard sword from the hilt on his back as he started forward, reeling it back as he all but pounced at Ragnar. Water splashed, cold and unforgiving.

Ragnar did not back down. He met him head on, stepping forward, raising not his shield to defend against the blow, but his broadsword. Metal screeched as the blades interlocked, whined as they struggled. Gadreel soon proved himself to be the more burly between the two, or at the very least, to have built more momentum. He pushed Ragnar back a few paces before their swords came suddenly undone.

Gadreel was relentless. A blow aimed for his head from the side and above. Ragnar parried with his shield. The sword swung back. He parried this too, now with his broadsword, and he used the force of the blow to start to the side and backward, to again put distance between himself and the knight.

The cold wind snatched at his clothes, sent dark hair whipping against Ragnar’s face as he moved. 

Gadreel approached again, swinging his sword as if testing its weight as he stalked closer. The chill of the water was beginning to creep into Ragnar’s boots, but he could hardly feel it, could hardly hear the river as it moved over the roar of his own blood in his ears, the heaving of his chest.

Gadreel leapt for a stab into Ragnar’s torso the moment he was close enough, and although Ragnar deftly strafed to one side to avoid it, the sword would have dealt him a nasty cut to the side of his waist, if not for all his fur and his armor. He could feel the seam of his coat burst under the edge of the blade, but he had not an instant to worry about it. He tried for a swing at Gadreel’s feet while he had the chance, but the knight leapt backward at the last moment, and he only clipped bronze armor.

Gadreel took sudden hold of his sword arm, then. Twisted. What—? thought Ragnar, just before he felt the man’s elbow collide with the center of his chest, and then hard into side of his jaw, already bruised from his bar fight the night before. He cried out and he wrenched himself from Ser Gadreel’s grasp, for an instant stumbling backward, and in that brief instant, Gadreel struck him with the blunt end of his sword.

“Is that all?” Gadreel bellowed, goading. “Come on, Eosphorite, come on!”

Ragnar’s boots skidded in the water as he was blown backward— seeing red, spitting red, charging. 

The two circled like mongrels, snapping hungry jaws at each other, unrelenting and brutal on either side, every movement made with the intent to kill, or, at the very least, to survive. Ragnar was unwilling to concede to the defensive again, matching Gadreel strike for strike, and Gadreel was unwilling to take it up.

Swords collided, sparked against each other, interlocked again.

For a long moment, the two simply strained against the strength of the other, both heaving through clenched teeth. The river betrayed Ragnar, and one of his feet slipped, staggering him just enough that he faltered, and Gadreel was leaning over him, a nearly maddened smile on his face.

Ragnar exhaled against the edge of his own blade. He would wipe that grin off his face.

And then, Ragnar dropped his shield, let it fall and go clattering in the water. He took the hilt of his broadsword up in both of his hands, and he twisted it. There was a shrill wailing of metal against metal as he dragged his blade up, up, and beyond the length of Gadreel’s bastard sword, blue sparks flying, and the cut he dealt up across Gadreel’s face sent crimson splattering across his own.

Gadreel reeled, shouting. Ragnar let him go, picked his shield back up.

Ragnar took a moment to catch his breath while Gadreel forced himself to his feet. He ran a hand back through his tangled hair, bit his lip, and he rubbed at his aching temples. This was a hell of a way to work off a hangover. Inhaled, exhaled. Returned his eyes to Gadreel as the man stood.

Thunder rumbled, in the near distance. The storm was moving quickly.

“Well,” said Gadreel, slowly forcing his hand away from his bloodied face. Ragnar had cut upward, across his nose and through his brow, and it looked as if he had cut him deep. He nearly felt guilty for it. It had not been an honorable blow, but cutting a man in his face was surely not so dishonorable as elbowing a man in his face. “Should’ve figured there’d be a reason you’ve lived this long, eh?”

Ragnar reached down and held tight to his broadsword. “I suppose you should have,” he returned.

Gadreel straightened, reaffirmed his grip about his sword, a ragged chuckle bubbling up from in his throat. “You sure got riled up there for a second, didn’t you, Eosphorite?” he remarked, voice ragged from his grunts and his war cries. “It was fun. Just how riled up can I get you, I wonder?” 

Ragnar raised his shield, held tight to the hilt of his blade, ready to defend himself. Gadreel started forward, and Ragnar did not allow himself a single step backward, not an inch of retreat. Gadreel’s blade collided with his shield, and this time, Ragnar held his ground, straining against the force of the blow. The time was fast approaching to see an end to this, no matter what that end may prove itself to be.

“Ragnar? Is everything alright? The storm—”

He jolted at the sound of their voice. Stiff in every muscle, he turned his gaze briefly, reflexively, to the shoreline. No. No, he had not taken care of this swiftly enough. There Deus stood, sweet and glowing in the daylight, their eyes shifting from him, over to his opponent, and then back to him.

He had taken too long. They had come looking for him.

Ragnar could feel his breath quickening in his chest. He turned his gaze to Gadreel, willing himself to focus, ready to steel himself once more, and yet the grin on the knight’s face was enough to strip him of his wits all over again. “Well, now. That _is_ a pretty little wife you’ve got yourself,” Gadreel heaved, voice a breathless chuckle, face bloodied, his pale colored eyes slowly shifting to meet Ragnar’s.

Deus took a step backward, hesitantly. Like a fallow doe that wanted to flee, knew it should flee, but could not yet bring itself to. Ragnar nearly mustered the breath to call for them to run, hide, anything, but before he could find his voice, Gadreel had already broken from him, thrown him aside.

Was he running toward Deus? No. He couldn’t be, and yet he was. No!

Ragnar was on his feet the split second after he fell. No, no, no!

He had been running the whole of his life, fleeing from things that hated him too much to ever keep from gnashing their teeth, running toward things he could never quite catch, and yet Ragnar did not think he had ever run so quickly in all his life. His boots skidded in the water as he ducked— dove, practically— gathering Deus up in one arm and throwing his shield up to protect them with the other.

Halfway through the motion, Ragnar felt the impact of Ser Gadreel’s sword against the wood of his shield, and he was not quite ready for it. He buckled, just a little. Just enough. He heard the blade hiss and clatter as it slipped against wood grain, and Gadreel stumbled, thrown off his balance.

Ragnar heard Deus cry out, but he did not yet know whether it was a cry of pain or of surprise. He hoped dearly, prayed to the heavens above, that it was surprise. He did not have time to look.

Ragnar could hear his blood roaring in his ears, could feel his heart thundering in his chest. He had to get them away from him. Away from the Creed. The Creed had taken so much from him. It would not take Deus from him. The mere thought of it struck wild panic into the pit of his being.

He clutched them close to himself with the curve of his sword arm, moving backwards, away from Gadreel, as far away from Gadreel as Ragnar could get them. Away. Away. He had to get them away, but wherever he went, Gadreel would surely pursue. He was pursuing even now, stalking after Ragnar like a hunting dog stalked a fox. He had to think of something. Something. Something!

“His armor,” murmured Deus, then, perhaps sensing the drum of his heart. There was a quiver to their voice, but they spoke calm and clear all the same, “seems very heavy. It would not float well.”

Ragnar barely had the wits about himself to understand their words, and even when he did; _What?_

“Don’t run from me,” spat Gadreel. “I know that’s not all you’ve got in you. Come on. Come on!”

The knight’s armor rattled against itself as he walked, so loud that it nearly drowned out the roar of the waterfall at Ragnar’s back. Hold on, Ragnar paused, glancing briefly over his shoulder. The waterfall. The river. Gadreel would surely drown, trying to swim in that armor, and Ragnar knew the river far better than he ever could. He knew how deep it was. He knew where it would take them.

Thunder rumbled, but the river hissed louder, as if beckoning to him.

Gadreel swung at him, bellowing, goading again, and Ragnar offered his blow no reply. He pulled backward, out of his reach, holding Deus close to himself. He felt the river slope down under the sole of his boot. He had not even one step to retreat backwards, but he did not need even one.

“Hold tight to me,” he said, and he twisted and threw them both over into the foaming white river.

***

Ragnar had always considered himself a strong swimmer.

Strong enough, at least, to keep the both of them alive until the river calmed.

When it finally spat them out, Ragnar dragged them both from the water onto the muddy riverside, breathless Deus holding tight around his shoulders. He sputtered, and reached up to draw them to him as he dragged himself up onto his knees, breath ragged in his chest. He could not seem to catch it, no matter how hard he tried. Heavens above, he was old. Or perhaps he was simply out of shape.

The cold water had eaten through his clothes and into his very bones. It certainly did not help that the storm had finally reached them. A cold rain pelted them as the pair of them sulked like wet cats at the shoreline. They simply went from drenched underwater to drenched on land.

Even Deus seemed to be shivering where they had settled upon his knee, their arms winding around themselves as they trembled. He tugged his soaked cloak from where it still clung to one of their shoulders, figuring that it would not do very much keep them warm, anymore. “Heavens above,” he said. “To think I had dared to say that it was cold before we were soaking wet. At least we are far away from that beast of a knight, now. Clever soul,” he murmured. Exhaustion clung to him. “I do not know what I did before you.”

Deus did not so much as offer him a smile, did not even lift their face.

Ragnar paused, at this, and gave them a gentle shake to catch their attention. “Were you hurt?” he asked, dreading the answer. And, when they would not meet his eye; “Look at me.”

Deus lifted their face to meet his eye, lips quivering with the rest of them, and they slowly drew their hand away from where they had clutched at their arm. It was not so long before bright, golden light began to creep from a gash across their upper arm. The palm of their hand was smeared with it.

“No. No, I… It is nothing more than a scratch, but I think I had forgotten,” they offered, their voice nearly a whimper, “what pain felt like. It feels almost like heartbreak.” Tears welled in their eyes, and they burned nearly as brightly as their blood did. “Ragnar. Ragnar, I simply… Forgive me.”

Ragnar hushed them and set them down on the earth before him.

He pulled extra fabric from one of his pockets, the same fabric he used to wrap his wrists forearms in. He waited for Deus’s permission to begin wrapping their arm. “There is nothing to forgive,” he said as he worked, careful to handle them gently. He tried very hard to be gentle, gentle with most everything, but especially them. “I have done you a greater wrong. I should have protected you from this.”

Deus shook their head in disagreement, but offered no other argument, reaching up with their free hand to wipe the tears from their face. Thunder rumbled overhead, and they jolted a bit at the sound, fair eyes darting up towards the sky. Ragnar took pause to calm them before continuing.

“Still, you should have run the moment you understood what was happening. He would have dealt a far worse wound unto you, had he not lost his chance,” he chided them, pulling the bandage taut about their arm, so little in his hand. Like the wing of a bird. They burned bright, more so than he ever could. They bled daylight, when their skin was broken, and yet, their arm was so soft and warm under his touch. Ragnar swallowed, drew back perhaps later than he should have. “You frightened me.”

To Ragnar’s surprise, Deus reached out and scrambled to catch his hand up in their own as he drew back. They pulled it back towards themselves, held it tight against their chest, but they did not so much as whisper to him, not for a good while. He felt as if his heart had suddenly gone still.

“I did not want to go anywhere without you,” Deus managed. There was still a quiver to their voice.

“Deus…?” said Ragnar, only because he could think of nothing else to say.

Lightning flashed overhead, soon accompanied by the sudden roar of thunder.

And Deus, the kindest thing that had ever happened to him, yelped. They yelped, and they let go of his hand, and they clapped their own, hands over their ears. They curled into themselves, shaking in every limb. They wept, quietly and yet shamelessly, daylight spilling from their eyes. “I hate this,” they cried. “I hate the rain. I hate thunder. I hate lightning. I hate being hurt.” They buried their face in their hands. “I can feel this body _dying_ all around me! I cannot stand it. I cannot stand it!”

Something inside Ragnar broke, to see them like this.

In all their time together, they had been ineffable. He did not think they had ever betrayed to him such a display of frightfulness. He knew he could do nothing to ward off the storm as it surged overhead or the rain as it fell, and yet, he could not stand it. He could not stand to do nothing.

Ragnar reached for them, gently and carefully as a man as large and as sodden as himself could be.

“Deus,” he said again, this time to ask if he might touch them again, and yet, before he could even begin to ask, they had already thrown themselves into his arms, cowering against his chest. He gathered them up against him, up inside the surely familiar darkness of his cloak, woven from the same material as their new dress. At least Gadreel had not torn their dress. “I am here,” he assured them.

“You’re here,” they echoed, hands fisting in the fabric of his coat. “Forgive me. I feel so childish.”

They were so much smaller than him. Even clutching to him as they were, he had to bend and lean down to truly hold them close. “You are so brave, and so quiet,” he murmured, one hand splayed in their hair, pale gold tangled between his fingers. “I will keep you safe. I swear it.”

Deus nodded a bit in understanding. “You’ll keep me safe.”

He lifted them up into his arms, and they clung to him, trembling in a way that Deus did not often tremble, as thunder and lightning rumbled overhead. Ragnar drew them closer to himself, his lips in their hair. “I will find someplace safe to spend the night,” he promised. “Out of the rain.”

Deus nodded their head again, shaking breath warm against the vee of his throat. “Thank you.”


	9. The Nest in the Abandoned Chapel

When the white mare found him, the storm was raging like a weeping god.

Ragnar climbed up onto her back with a little more difficulty than was normal, in part due to being soaked to the bone and in part due to the fact that Deus still clung to his arm. Nonetheless, he managed it easily enough. And so, with Deus seated in front of him in the saddle and lightning cracking like a terrible whip overhead, he spurred the mare into a gallop through the trembling forest.

There was an old chapel, he knew, up atop the precipice a tall hill that overlooked the forest and all the villages around it. Ragnar, hardly keen on treading land claimed by the Creed, had never been one to frequent it, but he knew the way there, and he knew it had been left abandoned and untouched for many years. Last he’d seen it, it was dilapidated and overgrown, but not so dilapidated that it would not provide them decent enough shelter from the rain, if they were to go down a staircase or two.

When they reached the old chapel, it was exactly as he last recalled it— Stone walls worn and edges softened from the elements, parts of the ceiling collapsed, the whole expanse of it covered in weeds, and in climbing ivy, withering in the encroaching winter cold, and in thick, thriving holly. 

Ragnar dropped down off the mare so to shoulder the big, overgrown wooden doors open. He then took the mare by her reins and lead her inside, out from the rain and into the vestibule. The horse snorted and shook the rainwater from her mane as he reached to help Deus down from her back. 

“Is this alright?” he asked, gently setting them down on the stone floor, covered in moss and lichen.

Deus nodded their head. “I don’t mind an old place, one in awhile. It’s out of the rain. That is more than enough,” they murmured in response, reaching up to push their wet hair back from their eyes as they spoke. Thunder rumbled, and they startled, clutching tight to his coat. “F… Forgive me…”

Ragnar hushed them and took hold of their hand again, so small and soft in his own.

Wordlessly, he took his pack from where it sat on the white mare’s back, slung it over one shoulder, then lead Deus deeper into the cathedral, searching the walls of the ruined worship room for a staircase downwards, hidden from any indication of the storm raging above them. When they finally found one, he had to force the old door back onto its hinges before he could open it. Ragnar pulled as dry a wick as he could find from his matchbox and found a torch on the wall to light their way.

“We’ll take shelter downstairs. The stone will muffle the sound of thunder,” he explained. “Deus?”

Deus’s gaze had fallen down to the floor of the chapel, where a set of boot prints other than theirs and Ragnar’s own had disturbed the dust and the moss the stone was all daubed in. The tracks were old and faded, but nonetheless Ragnar was a bit surprised to catch sight of them. He had thought this place forgotten and hidden away enough for anybody who did not know the woods as well as he did to find it.

“Do people still visit this place?” Deus asked quietly.

Ragnar considered that for a while. “Surely not. It is too far from any of the villages nearby to be a reasonable place to worship,” he said finally. Then, giving their hand a gentle tug; “Come, now. It stormed not long ago, on the Creed’s holy day before last, before I met you. I would bet this person took shelter out of the rain here, just as we are. Do not worry yourself over it. The hour grows late.”

Deus hesitated for a moment, curious still, but startled when thunder rumbled overhead again, and, holding tight to Ragnar’s arm, followed him down the staircase without protest.

It was dark, and the air quickly became thick with dust as they approached the bottommost steps of the stairwell, descending into what looked to be an old corridor. Ragnar’s breath caught on the wet, dusty air, and he coughed a bit on the way down, but Deus did not much seem to mind it. He took a moment to clear his throat, then lifted the torch to better peer into the corridor. There was a door on either side, likely into some form of living quarters for the worshippers, long ago having abandoned it.

He moved to take another step, but Deus tugged at him. “Be cautious of where you step,” they said.

Ragnar immediately drew his boot back and followed their eye downward, where he found that the next step downward was covered in little brown pellets, most of them gone gray and dusty with time. “Rat droppings,” he mused aloud, lifting Deus up and placing them down a few steps ahead of himself, so they would not step in it. His hands lingered at their waist for a moment, perhaps a moment too long, before he moved to join them. “We will have to light a fire, to keep them away. If only to be safe.”

Thunder rumbled, not so far away, and the sound of it was so muffled by the thick stone all around them that it could hardly even be heard. It was so quiet that Deus did not so much as flinch, although one soft hand did reach absently for him. He took hold of it, held the torch with the other.

“It is only rats,” Deus replied, drifting closer to him as they spoke. “They take shelter, just as we.”

Ragnar could not help but feel a bit happy— or perhaps self-satisfaction, he did not know which, to be able to offer them some semblance of a sense of safety. “Rats are witches’ pets,” he contended, guiding them onwards down the hall. “They trade in secrets, and keep plague in their mouths.”

He shouldered open a whining, heavy wooden door, worn as the rest of the place.

He peered inside. “Will this do?”

“It is more than enough,” came Deus’s quiet response. Then; “Thank you. Thank you, Ragnar…”

They set up camp in what was perhaps once a wine closet, now lost to tree roots and dust and moss.

It took hours for the rain to stop, and even longer for Ragnar to fall asleep. He lied on the floor with his back to Deus, and theirs up against his, and even despite the rumblings of the storm being muffled and distant, Deus seemed to toss and turn in their sleep upon each clap of thunder. He could hear them, could feel them move at his back each time they stirred. He wondered if they dreamed, as he did.

After what felt like forever, he rolled over to face them.

He reached and he placed a hand gentle at their arm, cautiously traced the curve of their shoulder till they stirred again. They were warm, hazy and golden, even as they awoke. They turned to look at him over their shoulder, weary eyes fluttering. Ragnar gathered his coat up in one hand and lifted it, wordlessly offered them a place against him, as dark as he surely was, all black woods and cold winds.

When he managed to drift off to sleep, he did so with warm, hazy gold in his coat, against his chest.

***

It was dark when Deus woke him, darker even than it had been before he went to sleep.

To awake in such darkness was disorienting. He was not certain whether morning had yet broken or not, but the fire he had built had burnt down to naught but embers, and the sound of the rain outside had gone quiet, or at least still enough to no longer be heard. His entire body felt stiff and ached dully, perhaps from the rain, perhaps simply a result of sleeping for too long on a hard wooden floor.

Deus was no longer curled against him in his coat. Their absence alarmed him for an instant, in his groggy state, but it did not take him too terribly long to glance over his shoulder and see them crouched at his side, the corners of their brows turned upwards and their hands in their lap.

Ragnar dragged himself upright. “Is something the matter…?” he yawned, his voice a groggy slur.

“Listen,” Deus said. And then, they parted from his side, rose to their feet, and they made their way up to the nearest old wall, pale eyes moving as if following an invisible line along the walls. They stopped every now and again, taking a moment to glance over at Ragnar, and perhaps to listen. Finally, they lifted one slender hand up to the wall and, very gently, knocked on it; once, twice, three times.

Ragnar heard it, then, the faintest of rustling noises from behind the walls, so quiet that he thought for a moment that he had surely imagined it. “Heavens above, what…?” he trailed off.

Deus said nothing, merely broke away from the wall, then, and began walking briskly down the hall again, this time much closer to the wall than before, their eye fixed upwards, their brows slightly furrowed. Ragnar rose to his feet and took another old torch from the sconce on the wall, lighting it as best he could with the embers of their fire, then hurried to trail behind them as they turned a corner.

The pair of them soon came upon a ill-matched set of splintered wooden double doors. Deus stood patiently aside, waiting for Ragnar to catch up. They did not touch anything, even as he neared. The look on their face was strange. Familiar, somehow, but strange nonetheless.

Calm, but not without fear. Contemplative, but far from curious.

“There was something in the walls.” Their voice was hardly more than a whisper. “It’s everywhere.”

Ragnar simply held their gaze for a time. Then, without a word, he passed the low burning torch in his hand to them. He reached up a hand and pushed with his fingertips on one door, careful as a man like him could be. With the other, he reached to take up the hilt of his sword, still stained a ruddy brown along its edge with Ser Gadreel’s blood. He did not draw it from its sheath, not quite yet.

The old hinges creaked and whined as the door crept slowly open, and he leaned forward a little to peer into the room. He found a wide, open chamber, punctuated with stone support pillars and long since burnt out sconces. At the end of the room, upon the wall, was a stone statue of the Creed’s goddess, Gaia, and beneath her was a stairwell leading downward, into the darkness. It was quiet, unsettlingly quiet. The air was thick and difficult to breathe, and it reeked of something akin to urine.

In the very center of the room was a scattering of old bones, bared of any meat or skin.

Ragnar glanced down at Deus again and reached to take the torch back from them. They offered it to him without protest. “Stay close to me,” he said, letting go of his sword only to urge them closer to him. 

To his shock, they took sweet hold of his arm, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. For an instant, he felt his heart still in his chest, and then, they drew their hands back.

Ragnar realized after a moment that they had wound their fine golden cord, still decorated with its tiny pearls and seashells and feathers, five times around his wrist, over the bandages he had wrapped his forearm in. He opened his mouth to speak, although he was not certain what it was he intended to say. It did not end up mattering very much, however, because Deus lifted their face to meet his eye.

“Don’t speak,” they said, and a slight grin quirked at their lips, nearly coy. “I never told you, I don’t think, but this is a charm for good fortune and protection. A friend made it for me, but you have a greater need of it than I. For now, I want you to have it. It will keep you safe wherever I cannot.”

It took him a moment to recover his wits, but he steeled himself and eased further into the chamber.

The chamber remained quiet as they approached, almost suffocatingly so. It was difficult to breathe.

A slight breeze crept through the chamber, reeking of urine and rot and mildew, and its whispering was the only thing that could be heard, aside from the sound of Ragnar’s footsteps as he walked (Deus, as they always did, made hardly a sound as they walked, slight and barefooted as they were).

The bones scattered in the center of the room were still as the death that had claimed them, stained brown with dirt and blood and green with moss. Amongst the mess was a human skull.

Deus parted from his side, then, to kneel where the bones were most gathered and to carefully reach out and touch one with their fingertips. “Look at this,” they remarked, unruffled, as they plucked the bone up into their hands, carefully, to show him. “It’s as if they’d been gnawed upon.”

Ragnar swallowed a cringe. He had never too fond of the sight of human bones. He leaned to urge Deus back towards himself. “Come away. You know not what did the gnawing.”

And then, quite suddenly, the whispering of the wind did not sound very much like wind, anymore.

Ragnar’s body seemed to sense the change before his mind registered it. He felt the hair on his arms suddenly stand shock straight, felt his heart stutter in his chest, his breath go still in his throat. He lifted his head, eyes instinctively searching the darkness, his hand tightening upon Deus’s shoulder.

He did not have to ask if they felt it, too. Slowly, Deus set the bone back down and rose to their feet.

“Something is wrong with this place,” they said quietly, edging backwards till they stood by his side.

Ragnar drew his battle-worn sword and he brandished it against the trembling shadows all around them. The trembling light of the fire in his other hand gleamed off the metal like embers over still water. He passed the torch again to Deus. They took it without protest. “Do not go far from me.”

“As ever,” Deus responded, turning their gaze over one shoulder to watch behind the both of them.

The chamber remained quiet, as still as a murdered heart.

The silence was more than deafening. It was nearly suffocating, and it did little to ease the wariness gnawing at his core. What little bit of breeze drifted through the room was like hot breath against his skin, spurring shudders up his arms and down his spine, bristling all his dark hair. Ragnar’s wrists ached terribly underneath the old bandages he had wrapped them in. He did not know why.

And then, as if the very darkness itself were groaning with the effort—

_“Drown in your own sorrow.”_

The shadows suddenly spilled forth, twisting and writhing and scrambling over itself to reach them.

It was as though he had thrown a rock at a beehive, blackness indistinct and yet churning all around him. For an instant that was too long and too frightening, Ragnar could not even comprehend what it was that surged toward them, until the torchlight caught hundreds, thousands, of black, beady eyes.

Rats. Rats, everywhere, everywhere, more rats than he had ever seen in his life.

“Shit!” Ragnar swore. Reflexively, he pulled backward, urging Deus behind himself with one hand, and yet he knew immediately that it would do no good. The rats swarmed, swarmed from every place he dared to look, wriggling like overgrown worms from every cranny of the chamber, every gap in the stone, every split in the flooring. “Gods. Gods above, that skeleton— did they eat them?”

“Try not to think of it,” said Deus. The sound of their even voice soothed the thunder of his heart, the roar of his blood, despite everything. “There is nothing we can do for them, now.”

Even still, the sight before him was more than a little nightmarish.

He could hear shrill squeaking, the whining of the old chandeliers overhead, the sound of old wood and stone straining against the sheer volume. He heard something crash, not so far away.

The rats seemed to fill every inch of darkness in the chamber, hissing and clamoring over their own little bodies to creep as close as they possibly could. Yet, they did not leap, did not pounce, did not move to feast upon him as they surely had upon the bones scattered across the stone.

Ragnar lifted his sword, more to remind himself that it was there more so than anything else, and, to his surprise, the rats seemed to flinch from it as firelight flickered off its blade.

Something was not right. He’d never known a rat foolish enough to fear the edge of a broadsword.

“Why are they not coming any closer?” Ragnar heaved.

“The light.” Deus sounded nearly breathless at the realization. “They are frightened of the light.”

At this, Ragnar turned his gaze over his shoulder to look at them. Indeed, wherever Deus stepped, whichever direction they turned the fiery torch in their hands in, the rats seemed nearly to cower, slinking backwards into the safety of darkness as if wounded. The swarm did not so much as flinch when his feet shifted, even despite how massive he was, did not even falter at the scraping of his blade against leather as he slid it back into the scabbard on his back. And yet, they recoiled from the light.

The fire burned in their little eyes, black as the Creed’s flags, sooty as the skin of the razh benyn.

“The rats that have plagued the townspeople,” Deus breathed. “This must surely be their nest.”

Ragnar reached a hand back to draw them to him again, hissing through clenched teeth upon his exhale. “Go, now! We cannot simply stay here and wait for the fire to burn itself out. Quickly,” he heaved, reaching to take the torch up. “Back the way we came. The light will protect us.”

Once again, Deus reached up and took hold of his arm. For certainty, this time.

_“My_ light will protect us,” they contended, steady and lionhearted as ever. Whatever spark the storm had made falter burned on their face again. “I keep the light of millions of stars inside my beating heart.”

Ragnar held the torch, but it was Deus that forged their path.

They held to his arm with their slender hands, keeping as close to him as they could, and yet, their step was far more confident, far more certain than his. He found himself following their footsteps as best he could, if only to distract himself from the wriggle of the infestation all around them.

The firelight may have kept them at arm’s reach, but it was nightmarish, sickening, even, having to watch the rats writhe and coil from them, out of the burning torch’s reach and into a thousand nooks and crannies in the stone, nooks and crannies Ragnar had not even so much as thought to notice, much to less look for, before. Heavens above, they had both slept down here! Amidst the crawling mass! For an instant, Ragnar found himself a bit nauseous, but the protection charm strewn about his wrist and the soft hands, fair and nearly glowing in the darkness, at the curve of his arm steadied him.

He, in the dark, found light brighter than any may see. He walked with the sun, surely.

The rats swarmed the halls around them, across the floor, up the walls, on the wooden beams over their heads, hissing and scrambling and shrinking back from the light. It was a relief to finally reach those old stone stairs leading upward, and an even greater relief to begin to climb them.

“Up there. Daylight,” Deus said, then, voice even and yet short-winded. “We’re there, Ragnar.”

When Ragnar finally caught sight of the old wooden door at the end of the spiraling staircase, he decided he had no more patience for caution, could not stand being amidst this nightmare a single second longer. As soon as he saw it, he took Deus up into his arms and he practically leapt up the final few stairs, shouldering the door open with enough force to send it slamming open outwards.

They fell stumbling back into the worship room, together, and there they were met with bright, pale morning light, gleaming from every window and hole in the old, overgrown storm.

The rats did not follow them, simply went crawling back into the holes from whence they had come.

Ragnar did not think he had ever been so glad to rush out into the nearly-winter cold. He collapsed to the stone floor beneath him, lying on his side. Relief washed over him, caught in his throat even as the early morning chill began to reach him even through all his clothes, his breath ragged in his chest, sweat and grime and dust clutching to his skin. Deus settled upon the earth far more gracefully than he, slowly lowering themselves down into a kneel on the stone and lifting one slender hand to touch their chest with.

The moment felt _real,_ oddly enough, more real than life had felt in a good while. Perhaps it was the adrenaline, paired with the sudden light of day. His lungs still felt small in all his ribs, too tight for words, almost too tight even to draw breath. “We are the luckiest two in all the world,” he mustered.

He mustered a grin when he heard Deus’s breathless laugh at his side, lifted his face to look at them.

There was relief in their face, though quiet and reserved as all their expressions tended to be. They smiled at him, less restrained than usual, and it was as if they’d decided something. The moment abruptly became hazy, like fog dissipating. For an instant, Ragnar was certain they were going to do something, and the uncertainty of what, exactly, spurred his heart into pounding all over again.

And then, a breeze carried through the chapel, rustled the ivy and holly, and Deus broke his gaze.

Ragnar did not know what he thought he saw.

They turned their eyes, blue as the day-lit sky overhead, away, and the corners of their brows began to turn slightly upward as they looked about the worship room. “Your horse is not here,” Deus said, rising to their feet. Their legs seemed far steadier than Ragnar felt his would be, should he try to stand.

It was not what he had been expecting them to say. “Gone, is she?” he asked. And then, he sighed, dragging himself up into an upright position with a bit of a grunt. “When is that roving beast ever here?” he pointed out. “There is no need to worry yourself too terribly over her. I would bet the old man’s sword she is hereabouts, somewhere. She will return to me whensoever she deems it timely.”

Deus simply turned their gaze back unto him. “I will go and look for her,” they said.

Heavens above, he was in the company of far more feminine and far more resolute entities than he himself was, wasn’t he? Ragnar could not help but allow himself smile at the realization. “Very well,” he resigned, lifting his arm to let it rest propped upon his knee as he spoke. “Wait a bit now, then, and I will accompany you. I beg that you allow an old man a little time to catch his breath.”

“You are not so old, dear Ragnar. Not so old as I. I have told you this.”

“Yes, yes, I am a young and spry pup, ready to frolic from the moment he awakes,” Ragnar quipped in reply, lying back down on the stone. “But I still must catch my damned breath.”


End file.
